I just achieved one of my career goals, giving a talk at DEF CON. What an incredible experience, I cannot thank enough the amazing people that make this con happen. My talk’s title was “Compromising online accounts by cracking voicemail systems” and I thought I write a blog post about it for people that was not able to attend. The goal of my talk was to demonstrate that the current state of security of voicemail systems is not much better than it was 30 years ago and what exactly is the impact of gaining unauthorized access to a victim’s voicemail today.
Voicemail systems have been with us for a long time and started to become popular in the ’80s. Just like with any other technology, the hackers and phreakers at the time got busy testing the security of these systems. They left us an amazing collection of articles and e-zines with valuable information of the approaches they took to hack them.
With that in mind, as in any other research, we need to start by looking into prior art.