WASHINGTON — A hacker broke into a Homeland Security Department telephone system over the weekend and racked up about $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia.
The hacker made more than 400 calls on a Federal Emergency Management Agency voice-mail system in Emmitsburg, Md., on Saturday and Sunday, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski.
FEMA is part of Homeland Security, which in 2003 put out a warning about this very vulnerability.
The voice-mail system is new and was installed recently. It is a Private Branch Exchange, or PBX, a traditional corporate phone network that is used in thousands of companies and government offices. Many companies are moving to a higher-tech version, known as Voice Over Internet Telephony.
This type of hacking is very low tech and “old school,” said John Jackson, a St. Louis-based security consultant. It was popular 10 to 15 years ago. Telecommunications security administrators now know to configure security settings, such as having individual users create unique passwords and not continue to use the password assigned to users in the initial setup.
“In this case it’s sort of embarrassing that it happened to FEMA themselves — FEMA being a child of DHS, with calls going to the Middle East,” Johnson said.
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Yemen are among the countries calls were made to, Olshanski said. Most of the calls were about three minutes long, but some were as long as 10 minutes.
Sprint caught the fraud over the weekend and halted all long-distance calls from the FEMA site.
FEMA’s chief information officer is investigating who hacked into the system and where exactly the calls were placed to. At this point it appears a “hole” was left open by the contractor when the voice-mail system was being upgraded, Ol shanski said.
