Analog Telephone Adapters may be useful, but they have a glaring vulnerability that has been taken advantage of by many hackers. According to a report from TransNexus (News - Alert), there is a security flaw that hackers can and are using to steal SIP credentials from subscribers, which are then resold for telecom fraud.

The white paper from TransNexus, “VoIP Theft of Service: Protecting Your Network” details the hacking scenario, as well as other methods of fraud, such as voicemail hacking, call forwarding hacks and more. It also includes ways to combat telecom fraud, by use of fraud detection software such as the company’s own SDReporter.

Should the ATA devices get backed, they will continue to function, leaving the customer unaware of anything until it’s too late. At the same time, they will stop talking to the carrier’s configuration server, making it useless although still functioning.

When a breach is discovered, there is no cure-all solution that can be sent to all devices to prevent any other attacks. Instead, the owner must perform a factory reset, so that they can resume using it as normal.

"Once we discovered this particular vulnerability, we were able to get ahead of it pretty quickly," said Ryan Delgrosso, CTO for the telecommunications provider Phone (News - Alert) Power.  "We have seen other carriers with thousands of compromised accounts.  We have since shared our findings with many other carriers, and have validated that this is happening across the industry, on a global scale.  For many, this can be a nightmare scenario."

Proper security is always important. When a flaw is discovered, it’s safe to assume it’s going to be abused very soon, if it hasn’t been already. Fortunately, there are always ways of protecting one’s device. Even if it means a factory reset, the ATA devices can be recovered, and future versions will fix the vulnerability. Until it is completely fixed, however, we must take steps to ensure the security of our devices and our data. The whitepaper from TransNexus provides information on just how to do that and what hacks to avoid.