Slingshot Orbit of Technology

Ang Cui and Michael Costello give a talk at the 29th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg titled, Hacking Cisco Phones.

Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean your phone isn’t listening to everything you say

The two speakers “demonstrate practical covert surveillance using constant, stealthy exfiltration of microphone data via a number of covert channels.” Introspectively there are social issues around convincing people that phones matter.

Weaknesses within the firmware update process allows the attacker to make arbitrary modifications to the NVRAM contents of the device. The attacks we present exploit a functional vulnerability common to all HP printers, and do not depend on any specific code vulnerability. These attacks cannot be prevented by any authentication mechanism on the printer, and can be delivered over the network, either directly or through a print server (active attack) and as hidden payloads within documents (reflexive attack).