Companies ignoring threat from meeting room hackers, warns security expert
Thousands of companies may be harbouring spies in their meeting rooms that listen to private conversations, warned a security expert at the RSA conference, which has just ended in San Francisco.
Michael Sutton, vice president of research at security firm Zscaler, presented evidence demonstrating that thousands of embedded web servers in devices such as video-conferencing systems remain unprotected. These can be remotely hacked with little effort, despite repeated warnings from security analysts.
Sutton used automated scanning tools to poll more than a million web servers and found more than 9,000 unprotected video conferencing systems from Polycom and Tandberg, the latter of which was recently acquired by Cisco. Access to video-conferencing products allows hackers to listen to meetings even when the system is not being used by the participants.
