Asterisk gets a blackeye thanks to the FBI and PC Magazine...

There’s been a lot of talk about Asterisk being easily hacked thanks to this PC Magazine article. I first became aware of it through the VoIP Insider Blog post by Garrett Smith. But I think Rich Tehrani from TMC best explained the whole situation in this blog post.

In short, the article says that “Criminals are taking advantage of a bug in the Asterisk Internet telephony system that lets them pump out thousands of scam phone calls in an hour.” To validate this threat there was a warning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

So why are we joining the fun? Well first of all, as anyone familiar with Asterisk can tell you, as we very much are, the platform is completely safe and the likelihood of this happening to your system is as likely as you winning the lottery. And second, we want to say kudos to John Todd and the team at Digium for publicly setting the record straight so concisely and quickly. Security is not something to be taken lightly and I think Digium handled the whole situation very gracefully.