Security of IP PBX OS Matters Alot

Monday, 18 October 2004 19:00 Written by Peter Brockmann

Here's a first hand account

John Littleton writes:

"While attending the GMIS conference in Savannah, Ga. I attended a presentation given by some of the Georgia state agencies called "OOPS". They went into detail of some failed projects along with issues they deal with. The one that had the most impact was Columbia County. They had security issues that brought the network for the entire county down even though they had updated virus definitions and a firewall in place.

Columbia County had 40 hours of complete county down
25 hours of partial county down
$44,361.95 was the recovery cost. (Not including time lost for employees, only calculating IT costs)
Every Microsoft machine on the network was infected
Agabot, My Doom, SMSC.exe, Fortnight
Network utilization was at a max and unstable.
The stations had updated Symantec definitions that were not catching the problem
They replaced PC's with dumb terminals just to get some work done until problem was resolved.
After getting patches and updates that could help them clean their network they spent 3 hours per PC. (600 PC's)

Through this entire process they did not have 1 min of downtime on the NBX or any quality issues.

The worms, network performance issues, etc... did not affect their current phone system. (Restating, every Microsoft device on the network was completely down) When talking to the engineer that worked on all of these issues he stated, "Our phone system was unaffected. By the way, it made it a little easier to clean all the systems by unplugging the PC from the back of the phone"

Thanks John for this submission. See my related blog on IP PBX OS matters.