Hacker Jailed for Stealing VoIP Services

A hacker by the name of Robert Moore has just been jailed for two years in the U.S for stealing VoIP services in a router. He was discovered after he had breached security at 15 separate telcos with an unbelievable ease.
His main target in this global hacking exercise was telcos and corporations. He wanted to steal VoIP services and then sell them using a third party.
In a statement released during the trial, AT&T said that Robert Moore ran a total of six million scans on its network alone. As for other companies that were successfully raided, they now use aliases to disguise themselves and to build up more confidence in their services.
According to reports, Robert Moore stole 10 million minutes of service which he re-sold at discounted rates. The net illegal profit made from the sale was more than $1 million. For all his efforts, he got only a merger sum of $20,000. Can you imagine that!
When pressed further on what made the hacking job easy. Moore replied that 70% of all the companies he scanned were unprotected, and 45% to 50% of VoIP providers were also unprotected.
The default passwords posed a lot of security problems. Most companies do not reset the default password on their routers. According to his statement at the trial, 85% of them were misconfigured routers which still had the default passwords which is very easy to get. The default passwords were mostly 'admin' or 'Cisco0'.
On getting the default password, any hacker can have access to the router almost anytime. With this, he can get any information; infact the entire database in the router will be at his disposal.
To show how bad the situation is, a small telco company got busted due to expenses it acquired from the amount of traffic Moore diverted through their network.
Experts in this industry have known for a long time that not changing the default passwords in a router is a widespread and dangerous problem. The only way the problem of hacking can be resolved is if vendors will always endeavour to change the default password of a router the first time it is used. This way, hacking into routers would be minimised or even stopped.