During a FOX TV show, Stuart Varney's Blackberry phone was hacked and the host received two caller ID spoofing calls , intended to trick him into revealing sensitive information about the company's computer network.
Luckily this was part of a live demonstration, and the hacker was none other than John McAfee, founder of McAfee Antivirus, a company that is currently part of the security division of Intel Corporation.
Varney asked McAfee to show how a phone could be used by an attacker to gain access to a company's systems.
The spoofing method chosen by the hacker was to trick the recipient into thinking the call was coming from someone in their contact list. Before initiating the call, McAfee said he accessed the contact list stored on the BlackBerry device to search for a high-profile company employee's number to make the trick more believable.
“The first thing I’m going to do is call voicemail, access it, and then the system is going to make the call.” At this stage of the attack demonstration, McAfee said he had already accessed the contact list and was looking for “something that says FOX Office or President of FOX News” so that he could make the call with that contact.
Once the spoofing was done, tricking the recipient of the call was simply a matter of social engineering. McAfee said he would pretend to be an FBI agent, using a name he had read in the newspapers, and would like to inform the victim of a major security breach and that the FBI was auditing the company's communications system.
For verification purposes, he would ask the victim for the company's network login credentials. In the same way, he would make calls to other company employees to have a better chance of success. Once he knew the username and passwords, he would enter the network and have access to FOX data.
The demonstration was intended to show a possible way, using the spoofing method, that the Guardians of Peace may have used last month to break into Sony 's network and steal sensitive information.
