Corporate Boardrooms Open To Eavesdropping

cweditor writes "One afternoon this month, a hacker toured a dozen corporate conference rooms via equipment that most every company has in those rooms: videoconferencing. Rapid7 says they could 'easily read a six-digit password from a sticky note over 20 feet away from the camera' and 'clearly hear conversations down the hallway from the video conferencing system.' With some systems, they could even capture keystrokes being typed in the room. Teleconferencing vendors defended their security, saying the auto-answer feature that left those system vulnerable was an effort to strike the right balance between security and usability."

Comments

Why video conference?

[Colonel Korn]

My experience is as a scientist and probably is of limited value in other fields, but: I've seen places where the remote meeting culture centered on video conferencing and I've seen places where it instead centered on audio, with the video replaced by slides. The slides normally show useful experimental data or borderline useful financial data. The video normally shows bored people.

When an internal meeting has video it's generally a sign that the meeting doesn't actually need to happen - it's better done through a couple emails or a quick IRC-equivalent chat. Again, outside the world of a scientist I expect this to be different.

Even the "experts" have problems

[hawguy]

When we bought our video conferencing system, the vendor that implemented gave us their VTC unit's number for testing. Their test VTC system is in their main conference room.

Well, one day we were demoing the unit to a group of people and we called the vendor's unit. They were in the middle of an intense meeting, the CTO of the company was nearly yelling at his staff about a missed sale - I guess he saw the camera swivel into position and yelled "Who turned that bloody thing on! Turn it off!"

Pretty funny from our point of view, and our sales rep called later to apologize.

So if the vendor that implements these for a living can't remember to turn off auto-answer when it's important, how can anyone else? I'm surprised at the number of companies that leave auto-answer turned on. (and am also surprised at the number of companies that re-use conference bridge numbers, I accidentally called into a conference bridge an hour early for a meeting, and got to listen to the vendor talking with a competitor about a new project).