'How I CRASHED my bank, stole PINs with a touch-tone phone'

Miscreants can crash or infiltrate banks and help desks' touch-tone and voice-controlled phone systems with a single call, a security researcher warns.

Rahul Sasi, who works for iSight Partners, said audio processing algorithms in office telephone networks and speech-driven command software are liable to crash when bombarded with unusual data in so-called fuzzing attacks.

Certain DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) signals can cause these private branch exchanges (PBX) and interactive voice response (IVR) systems to raise exceptions and bail out, much in the same way that unexpected input data can knacker applications running on a desktop computer or server.