[asterisk-biz] PBX got Hacked

[Andrew M. Lauppe]

I'm not standing up for SwitchVOX but I would point out that, on that 
platform, the root password is both unknown/undocumented, and there is 
no way to activate it for end-user access short of booting from a 
recovery CD and using single-user mode or chroot and running passwd.

In other words, SSH is useless on that platform so this machine had to 
be hacked some other way. Also - with no shell access, there is no 
access to the apache or asterisk logs, and no way to install fail2ban. 
If you're running switchvox, you *NEED *to put it behind a firewall with 
logging.

If you need help securing switchvox, or building a firewall with proper 
logging support, let us know. Anteil is happy to help.

Andy

Anteil, Inc. <http://www.anteil.com>
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*Andrew M. Lauppe
* /Consultant/
	
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voip-asterisk at maximumcrm.com wrote:
>> On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 21:54 -0500, Alex Balashov wrote:
>>     
>>> Agreed strongly.
>>>
>>> 1) For one, it sounds like you allowed remote root logins directly via
>>> SSH via password.  Many people seem to do this for convenience.  This is
>>> VERY BAD and should NEVER, EVER be allowed under any circumstances.
>>> Only password access to user accounts should be permitted 100% of the time.
>>>
>>> 2) Secondly, SSH should really not be open to the public at all.  With
>>> some hosts, that just can't be helped (public access boxes).  For a PBX,
>>> there is absolutely no reason why SSH should be open to anyone but you.
>>>
>>> My SSH on all servers is firewalled to everyone in the world and I can
>>> only get in through an OpenVPN management VPN.  If for some reason that
>>> fails or I am on a host that doesn't have a client, there are a few IPs
>>> that are allowed in as a back door.  That's it.
>>>
>>>       
>> Having the ssh server at the default port and accepting password
>> authentication its a security problem waiting to happen.
>> Looking at firewall logs you can see that the ssh port is scanned
>> routinely and brute force attacks happen all the time.
>> If you need to have ssh access open, move it a another port,disable
>> password auth and use only publickey auth.
>> Also as I see more and more companies implementing a strict "no incoming
>> ports open" policy (which is good), an option is to have a reverse ssh
>> tunnel.
>> http://skoroneos.blogspot.com/2009/01/doing-reverse-ssh-tunnel-embedded-way.html
>>
>>
>> I have implemented this in our embedded asterisk distro and now works
>> with the dialplan also.
>> i.e you trigger the connection from inside by dialing a number
>>     
>
> There are other ways too, including port knocking.
>
> For SIP bruteforce attack, I use fail2ban to monitor the logs and firewall 
> any attacks,in addition to having strong passwords and long sip user ids.
>
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