For the past six months or so, I have been helping a local charity with its I.T. needs. This includes updating their computers, designing and setting up a kiosk for its volunteers, and helping other charity members with their IT needs. Now I’m trying to map their network, and help the director of I.T. to ensure that all devices (desktop computers, printers, external hard drives, etc.) are accounted for.
About two or three weeks ago, I used nmap to do a quick scan of the local network, and check the devices on the network for what they were broadcasting, what ports were open, and just what that exact machine is. After finishing that, I met with their director of I.T. to discuss my findings. He verified most of what I found (we had a problem with one of those Western Digital MyCloud hard drives, but that was soon cleared up). But there was one part which baffled the both of us.
Just like many other small organizations, they use old phones. The ones they use are Avaya IP phones (i.e. voice over internet protocol [VoIP] phones), model 1616. I don’t know when they got these phones, but they’re old. When I scanned these phones, I only got their IP addresses; there was no hostname. However, on one particular phone, I found a hostname. It’s not a hostname you would find on any of the other computers on the network (they had hostnames that ended in “.local”). This one had the hostname “6lfb7c1.salmonbeach.com”. How it got this hostname, I am not entirely certain.
At first, I thought these were phones with a few features (voice mail, call fowarding, conference calls, stuff like that). As I have found out, these phones are fully featured, and have upgradeable firmware. The phone in question, the model 1616-1 BLK, gets its firmware from the local Avaya phone PBX server. Since it gets its firmware from the server, how can the hostname be changed? In the settings for the phone, the hostname can’t even be changed. One of the members of the charity’s administration said that they had problems months ago with the voice mail system. But I doubt that’s related to this problem.
So how should I approach this? Has it been hacked? Is it just a software glitch? Hopefully it’s nothing serious. The I.T. director said that he bought a bunch of these old phones on the cheap years ago, and he’ll look into flashing the firmware on the phone. So let’s hope that’s the last we’ll hear of it.
