Anthony M. Freed

Anthony M. Freed
Location
Eugene, Oregon, USA
Birthday
February 17
Title
Editor - Director of Business Development
Company
Infosec Island Network
Bio
Anthony is a researcher, analyst and freelance writer living in beautiful Eugene, Oregon. Anthony founded Information-Security-Resources.com in 2008, and merged forces with the Infosec Island Network in January of 2010. Infosec Island is committed to serving the needs of SMBs and mid-market enterprises across many industries, as well as nonprofits, government agencies, educational organizations, and the infosec community at large. Contact Anthony at afreed@wireheadsecurity.com regarding all aspects of business development, client and community relations. Many opportunities are currently available for business and strategic alignment at Infosec Island. Anthony also writes about the finance industry - particularly information security related topics - and is a fervent advocate of both freedom and accountability. Prior to founding ISR, Anthony received notoriety as a financial and business freelance journalist, including having numerous articles published by leading media syndicates such as The Chicago Sun-Times, Business Week’s Business Exchange, Seeking Alpha, InvestorCentric, OpenSalon, Bear Market Investments, Alacra Pulse, ML-Implode, Reuters, and dozens more. Anthony has worked as a consultant to senior members of product development, secondary and capital markets from the largest financial institutions in the country, and he had a front row seat to the bursting of the credit bubble.

JUNE 13, 2010 6:54PM

Hacking Approach to VoIP & Skype

Rate: 2 Flag
Skype certainly provides a very nice way for voice communication and chat, but questions remain: Is the system is secure and reliable? Can outsiders capture the conversation or intercept data?

To answer these questions, we will be searching different previous ways demonstrated by security researchers to hack Skype.

Intercepting data on VoIP systems is no different than traditional packet sniffing, the method is the same. The media is transmitted over UDP using the RTP (Real Time Protocol).

Now to analyze the data, we should use an advanced sniffer such as Wireshark, which can decode the session automatically and also provides graphs for results about different communication.

Recording VoIP is possible by using tools such as UCSniff (http://ucsniff.sourceforge.net/) this allows to:

• Targeting of VoIP Users based on Corporate Directory and/or extensions
• Support for automatically recording private IP video conversations
• Automatically re-creates and saves entire voice conversation to a single file that can be played back by media players
• Support for G.729, G.723, G.726, G.722, G.711 u-law, and G.711 a-law compression codecs
• Support for H.264 Video codec
• Automated VLAN Hop and VLAN Discovery support
• A UC Sniffer (VoIP and Video) combined with a MitM re-direction tool
• Monitor Mode
• Sniffs entire conversation if only one phone is in source VLAN
• Gratuitous ARP Disablment Bypass support
• TFTP MitM Modification of IP Phone features
• Realtime VoIP and Video Monitor

Intercepting video conferencing over the network is also possible unless the transition is encrypted. As security measures for signals TLS (Transport Layer Security) is used to protect SIP signals and RTP (Secure Real Time Protocol), but in most cases the voice is transmitted in just clear signal.

Skype mandates encryption of all transmitted traffic, but catching Skype calls is still possible.

Ruben Unteregger, a 33-year-old software developer from Switzerland, has made public the source code of a Trojan that taps into Skype conversations, The Trojan receives commands from a dedicated server, and then sends hackers the desired Audio files.

When the user opens up the Skype Client and starts a conversation, the Trojan performs a DLL injection that will allow it to attach itself to the Skype process and record all audio/video conversations.

The recorded audio files are then transformed from a PCM audio format to MP3, encrypted and sent to a server on the web.

As demonstrated, the method not only catches the keystroke, but all data transmitted by Skype audio and video. You can find more about it here: http://www.megapanzer.com.

Finally it is important to note that listening and recording conversation of other people is illegal and it is classified as a crime while these tools can be used to make a backup of your own conversations and as a Proof of Concept demonstration tool and a method of creating awareness around VoIP/UC threats.

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Comments

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White Hat hackers like thi author spend considerable time and effort to identify and examine existing threats that are regularly exploited by the bad guys - the remedy, though, is in the hands of the proprietors of the technology.

It's like someone yelling, "That car is going to hit you!" But they are not driving the car.

So, just try to get out of the way...