Hackers Infiltrate Desk Phones for Epic Office Pranks

A workplace tip: If you’re planning an office prank war, don’t target someone with the skills to reverse-engineer and control the phone on your desk.

That’s the lesson of a demonstration hackers Brandon Edwards and Ben Nell have planned for the Summercon security conference in New York today. After months of research that began with Edwards’ quest to avenge a coworker’s hazing, Edwards and Nell found vulnerabilities in a common desktop telephone that let them take control of it from any computer on the local network. With the phone fully under their command, they’ve made it perform mischief ranging playing audio files to displaying pictures of their choosing.

Good natured pranks aside, their work shows the potential for more nefarious hacks like surreptitiously recording conversations or sniffing traffic from a connected PC. “It’s a relatively simple device once you’re inside of it,” says Edwards. “We can make it do pretty much anything a phone can do.”