Possibly the most disturbing news out of the Black Hat security conference last week was how 
Asterisk, the open source PBX, is being increasingly used by hackers in a wide variety of hard to stop VoIP hacks. Everyone, from home users to corporate networks, could become a target.
Talks at the show explained just how easily an Asterisk based PBX can be used to launch attacks, notably "vishing" attacks, in which hackers use VoIP calls instead of phony Web links to steal personal and financial information.
Asterisk has become the hacker’s favored tool because it’s free, easy to use, and works with cheap, off the shelf hardware. Install Asterisk on an inexpensive PC, do a little tweaking, and you’ve got a full-blown PBX, something that previously would have been extremely expensive and time-consuming to do. Networking Pipeline | Blog
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