Magicjack & Security

[schatham]

I had had a number of problems when I initially installed magicjack on my system, and while going thru tech support, I was asked to disable various things as related to security, which I then re-started when the issue was resolved.

However, once those issues were resolved, it was less than a week before a Yahoo account and my wife's AOL account were apparently hacked. Lots of nasty stuff on them, etc.

I did not track down the AOL use, but traced the Yahoo account to a Yahoo Mobile account being accessed from Romania one morning.

I have firewall, virus scanning, spybot, etc all running & scheduled on this system. Each of them updates daily, scans daily and all return a clean bill of health.

In looking back thru those logfiles when I discovered the hacking, I noticed that one of them came up with a hit the same day as the account hacks took place.

The problem is - they were clear before that, and clear after that, and there was nothing running on the system OTHER than magicjack. Furthermore, I know my home network is secure as it is based on allowing ONLY specific IP's + a 50+ character key to access the network. I know nothing else was running on the PC also because the time this happened, no one was there to be using it.

I'm very concerned that with as much trouble as I've gone to to secure my network that MagicJack has opened an undetectable & unpatched hole in my security.

Has anyone else reported issues like this? All of this happened within the last 30 days.

[Matt9876]

I don't think running MJ in itself as being a big security risk, the open ports may draw attention to your machine but the hack probably centered around a program like AOL messenger or other.

You would be amazed how easy it is to take over a machine with an attack web site, one of the reasons I only surf the web with FireFox.

It is also a good idea to set up a machine just to run the MJ or get a MJ+ to run in stand alone mode. This takes other computer data and programs out of the equasion.

[Bartholomew Diogenes]

schatham, do you know what the motive for the attack(s) was? Do these foreigners have nothing better to do as they await the next batch of aid?
Matt9876, doesn't one want interaction with other programs, e.g., an e-mail acccount?