Asterisk Exploited To Go Vishing

Never give scamers tools they can exploit, because they will.

Since Asterisk is open source and easy to acquire, and because it is so powerful, some of the most inventive minds in technology, the ones that develop scams, have found a way to exploit Asterisk to go Vishing, a new term to describe phishing type scams that now involve VoIP.

In reading this VoIP-News.com story, it's interesting how crafty and creative these scamsters are. They used all the power found in Asterisk and the compatible plug ins to basically recreate a bank run IVR solution that could likely fool some, but not all of its customers.

This time around, according to the news account that was written by a Black Hat Conference speaker who consults on such subjects related to Security and Information Security, the scam had bad audio quality. I suspect though this will improve and the replication of an entire IVR system will be done, to create an almost mirror image of the bank. When that happens, the inexpensive tools found of Asterisk may be used for these and other grander ways.

But if your Digium, the company behind the commercialization of Asterisk, per se, one has to be happy in a twisted way. These scams prove that Asterisk can do a lot of what the big systems can do, and cost almost nothing to accomplish that.