Can your office phones be hacked?

For hackers, it can be a gold mine. Here’s just a partial list of things they can do:

• Eavesdropping or Sniffing: It’s surprisingly easy for hackers to listen in on your calls and record them to spy on your company. Once in, they can gain control of your mailbox, call forwarding, and caller ID to launch more complex attacks.
• Vishing (voice phishing): The hacker makes a recorded call purporting to be from a source you trust — your bank, for example — to get you to divulge account information.
• Caller ID Impersonation: The hacker steals the caller ID number of your bank and makes a live call using it, asking you to “verify” financial information.
• Call Fraud, Toll Fraud, or Spam over Internet Technology (SPIT): Very lucrative for a hacker, who taps into your VoIP line and uses it to make high-volume spam calls to foreign countries.
• Denial of Service (DoS) Attack: The hacker floods your server with data, using up bandwidth. A DoS attack can cause your connection to deteriorate or be shut off completely.
• Inserting Viruses and Malware: Just like office computers, your internet phones are vulnerable to programs that can track keystrokes, destroy information or instruct the phone to make spam calls.

Perhaps you think your company is too small or low-profile to attract attention from hackers — but don't count on it. Hackers are like burglars: They aren’t necessarily looking for the richest house on the block, but the easiest to break into.

The internet makes it easy for them. Many hackers use Shodan, which has been described as “the world’s most dangerous search engine,” because it describes the IT characteristics and weaknesses of sites that can be hacked.