Teleconferencing vendors say they're trying to strike the right balance between security and usability after security researchers found they could dial in to the conference lines of major companies and manipulate video cameras to spy on boardrooms.H.D. Moore and Mike Tuchen revealed their research for security company Rapid7 on Monday, detailing how easily attackers can secretly spy on boardrooms where conferencing systems have been left open to receive calls from anyone by default.The problem boils down to auto-answer, a feature in products from companies such as Cisco, LifeSize and Polycom that automatically connects incoming video or audio calls. Moore, who is chief security officer at Rapid7, wrote a program to scan for teleconferencing systems in which administrators left this feature enabled, a major security issue.Moore's scan covered about 3 percent of the addressable internet and found 250,000 systems using the H.323 protocol, a specification for audio and video calls. Moore said he found more than 5,000 organizations had left auto-answer enabled in products from vendors including Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize and Sony. Overall, the findings mean up to 150,000 systems across the internet could be vulnerable, according to Rapid7.Once inside a conference room, Rapid7 said that even cheap videoconferencing systems could allow a person to "read a six-digit password from a sticky note over 20 feet away from the camera.""In an otherwise quiet environment, it was possible to clearly hear conversations down the hallway from the video conferencing systems," Moore wrote on Rapid7's blog. "A separate test confirmed the ability to monitor a user's keyboard and accurately capture their password, simply by aiming the camera and using a high-level zoom."But if all of the security features of the various teleconferencing systems were enabled, Moore "couldn't imagine anyone would use the product to make a phone call" due to the complexity, he said in an interview. More...

Hackers under the AntiSec banner appeared to have hacked late Monday the website of OnGuardOnline.gov, the U.S. federal government's online security website, in protest against controversial legislation.In a message on the OnGuardOnline website and on Pastebin, the hackers threatened "a relentless war against the corporate internet", destroying what it said would be "dozens upon dozens" of government and company websites, if the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are passed.It also threatened to dump emails, passwords, bank accounts, and other information from the hacked websites. "We are sitting on hundreds of rooted servers getting ready to drop all your mysql dumps and mail spools," the Anonymous-affiliated hacker group said.OnGuardOnline.gov is a partnership of fourteen federal agencies managed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).FTC could not be immediately reached for comment on the hack of the security website. The website of web defacement archive, Zone-H was also defaced Monday, but it wasn't clear who was responsible.Earlier on Monday a video purported to be from Anonymous asked for people's support to launch a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon tool on Jan 28 on Facebook. AnonOps, an Anonymous account on Twitter, however said the threat to shut down Facebook was a fake. A similar threat against Facebook was made last year.Anonymous last week claimed responsibility for attacks on some government and company websites including those of Universal Music, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Recording Industry Association of America in retaliation for the government's removal of the Megaupload online storage and file-sharing websites. More...