Unprotected VOIP Server Exposed Millions of SMS Messages, Call Logs

Jan 16, 2019

A California-based Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) services provider VOIPO has
accidentally left tens of gigabytes of its customer data,
containing millions of call logs, SMS/MMS messages, and plaintext
internal system credentials, publicly accessible to anyone without
authentication.

VOIPo is one of a leading providers of Voice-Over-IP
(VoIP) services in the United States offering reseller VoIP,
Cloud VoIP, and VoIP services to residentials and small
businesses.

Justin Paine, the head of Trust & Safety at CloudFlare,
discovered an open ElasticSearch database last week using the
Shodan search engine and notified the VOIPO’s CTO, who then
promptly secured the database that contains at least 4 years of
data on its customers.

According to Paine, the database contained 6.7 million call logs
dating back to July 2017, 6 million SMS/MMS logs dating back to
December 2015, and 1 million logs containing API key for internal
systems.

While the call logs included timestamp and duration of VOIPO
customers’ VOIP calls and partial originating and destination phone
numbers of those calls, the SMS and MMS logs even included the full
content of messages.

“Based on the user agent of some of the calls observed,…, it
seemed likely that this VOIP provider was targeted (as many of
them) by scanners attempting to make fraudulent 9xx premium calls,”
Paine wrote in a blog post ^[1] published Tuesday.

Besides this, the unprotected database also stored 1 million logs
containing references to internal hostnames, some of which also
included plaintext usernames and passwords for those systems. These
sensitive values were exposed since June 3, 2018.

“It is difficult to overstate the severity of this part of the
leak. Unless VOIPO had deployed adequate firewall protections
(which this researcher did not test) to limit access to internal
systems to a specific whitelist of IPs and/or a corporate VPN then
leaked internal hostnames in combination with the leaked usernames
and passwords could have resulted in a near total compromise of all
leaked production systems,” Paine said.

When Paine reached out to VOIPO, the company said this was “a
development server that had accidentally been left publicly
accessible.”
However, they also confirmed that the database also contained
“valid data,” which means real production data, without specifying
which data was allegedly development data and which was production
data.

Paine speculated that the leaked plaintext credentials were
likely production credentials and that the SMS/MMS and VOIP call
logs appeared to be production data.

The researcher notified VOIPO about the insecured ElasticSearch
database on January 8, 2019, and the company confirmed on the same
day that it took down the database offline.

This is second time in this month when a huge
database ^[2] containing millions of
users record has been found open to the world.

Just last week, we reported about a massive MongoDB database of
854.8 gigabytes ^[3]
of data containing records of over 202 million Chinese job seekers
that found accessible to anyone on the Internet without
authentication.

References

^{^}
blog post
(rainbowtabl.es)
^{^}
huge database
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
MongoDB database of 854.8 gigabytes
(thehackernews.com)

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Unprotected VOIP Server Exposed Millions of SMS Messages, Call Logs

References

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