June 7th, 2005
Pharming threats to IP phone networks described
From the giant Supercomm telephony trade show in Chicago, colleague Ben Charny reports today on concerns about a VoIP flavor of pharming. It’s DNS cache poisoning, pure and simple.
As Ben explains, pharming can exploit vulnerabilities in certain network equipment that translates email and Web addresses into IP addresses. Security experts at Supercomm are pointing out that by hijacking a domain-name server that organizes and stores IP addresses, pharmers can obtain control of VoIP calls.
You don’t want that to happen. Why? Your VoIP calls, or callers, could be directed to unintended and perhaps malicious, IP addresses.
We’ll be monitoring insights from Supercomm for solutions. If you have any, we’d like to hear about them as well. Post a TalkBack.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
