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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."
This may be good for some corporate espionage. But if any hacker is doing this thinking he's going to expose the dark corporate underbelly, he's going to be disappointed.
If my experience is any indication, the evil stuff doesn't go on in rooms like that. Contrary to the movies, you have very few open meetings where a bunch of guys sit around and openly plot evil deeds. Most of that stuff is done in much smaller settings, and even then they use euphemisms and obfuscation. It's not like someone says openly "Hey, can we we bribe some local politicians so we can get away with dumping our factory wastewater into their rivers?" Instead they say something like "How can we cut costs at this factory?" to which someone else responds "Well, if we could get rid of the burdensome environmental regulations down there, then it would help with profitability" to which someone else responds "I'll call our people there and have them talk with some of our political allies."
I imagine some "hacktivists" will hack these systems expecting to get a smoking gun. But after hours of watching, all they'll get are a lot of boring meetings filled with financial figures, shitty powerpoint presentations, and corporate-speak platitudes. It'll be a lot less "Here's our secret plan" and a lot more "Here are the fourth quarter earnings breakdowns" and "Let's talk about how we build synergy in Asian markets..."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If I were looking to do insider trading I wouldn't be bored at all.
I remember when Microsoft automatically executing email attachments was intended to strike the right balance between security and usability. That was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. But still. Everyone saw the security disaster coming. The "I Love You" email was one of the first to get widespread attention enough to be Microsoft's wake up call on taking security seriously. Gone were the days when you could send dot-dot-slash in a URL to work your way up the inetpub wwwroot directories and then to windows / tftp.exe to pull down malware from evil.com on a fully patched NT 4.0 IIS.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Saying that you're not going to find anything is a hilarious misdirect of the fact that the vulnerability has existed for a long time and still does.
Saying "oh they won't find anything" is still not an answer to "but we left the door wide open".
Not really that new. Most telephone systems allow it too.
The Samsung OfficeServ I have, I'm pretty sure I read in the manual about a "silent auto-answer pickup" you can do to a remote phone to tap into the speakerphone and hear anything said in the room WITHOUT indication of what you're doing on the target phone. All you need is the right passcode (which is easy if you're the IT guy) and the phone extension and you can hear whatever is said in the that room.
Given that phones are much more prevalent, much less prominent, and much more unexpected to be "hacked", I think you'd always have had greater success that way. And modern telecoms is all managed on the LAN and sometimes even remotely, so it's just as at risk as anything else.
The number one rule, of course, is don't let third-parties have access to your network, and don't have those sorts of "features" turned on.
My experiance with those VTC devices is that when they're off, they make efforts to show that they are indeed off, and conversely when someone connects they do stuff like swivel the camera around, turn on lights, etc... It may be possible to do that without someone noticing, but it seems more likely that you're going to get a whole lot of attention from some high power folks.
Since the company I work at does consulting for C-suite people at a lot of different organizations, I'm pretty sure I have observed enough people to cross the line from anecdotal experience to enough data to form a hypothesis (somebody should test it).
The "higher ups" don't understand technology, even as simple as videoconferencing equipment with a remote that is simpler than a typical cable-TV remote.
When they want to use a video conference, they get somebody from "IT" to come in, click the three buttons that make it hook up, then do their conference, and leave the room, still leaving the conference running because they don't know what the "hang-up" button does.
It isn't that they are idiots, it is just that they don't care, they have "people who handle that stuff" so they don't have to.
So, if the camera comes on, swivels around, auto-focuses, red lights come on, they ignore it, because they don't perceive it as "something I need to concern myself with".
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm glad that for political reasons we use a third party reflector to do our video conferencing. Basically one of our partners had a flaky video conferencing setup that their IT guys couldn't or wouldn't fix but were all too happy to blame us because we would host the conferences. We tried everything we could to insure things went smoothly but when we could find no faults with our setup (and many other sites around the world never dropped) we implemented a layer 8 solution and moved the hosting of the conference off our equipment and onto a third party reflector. The other party continued to drop until their management got so fed up with the obviousness that it was their fault that they hired someone to fix it. Since it works and protects us politically we've kept the system, guess there's a nice bonus out of it in that we have no open inbound ports for the video conferencing gear =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I go into a lot of boardrooms in my line of business and I was actually at a business a few weeks ago that was obviously concerned about this, so they used the low-tech solution of a cardboard box over the videoconferencing device.
On the box, in handwritten black magic marker, it said "Do not remove unless participating in a video conference!" Not exactly high-tech, but I suppose it was more effective than nothing.
At a place i used to work there was this one room that had a camera on a 2 axis pivot/drive. it was creepy when it would turn on and swing around to point right at you.
Did you work at the front gate of Jabba's palace?
It was a test. Did you mention it to them?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
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).
I actually did mount a piece of pegboard in an equipment rack with a smoked glass door and put christmas lights in the holes. I used the kind of lights that have a controller box for running patterns, and set it on "random", and left it running for about five years.
People with suits and ties would just stare at that thing in awe. My boss used to do her dog'n'pony shows standing in front of it.