A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
The problem affects voice-over-internet-protocol (Voip) phones, commonly used by businesses. Just by running a couple of lines of code on a website visited by the phone user, the researchers demonstrated how premium-rate calls could be made. A security expert said such bugs could make "millions" for the perpetrators. By exploiting the fact that Voip phones and desktop computers are connected to the same internet network at many organisations, attackers are often able to access the phones themselves and operate them without the owner becoming aware. "It's incredibly easy to do," said security researcher Per Thorsheim, who was involved in the demonstration by fellow researcher Paul Moore.
'Pay to be eavesdropped'
Mr Thorsheim explained that the phone could be compromised if the user visited a web page containing a couple of lines of Javascript web code, This code was designed to launch the attack on a device made by phone hardware manufacturer Snom.
"It will charge you a pound a minute and I will listen to whatever is being said close to your phone - you will be paying me to be eavesdropped," he told. Mr Thorsheim added that it was relatively easy to update the phone's security settings to prevent this. However, he pointed out that most companies would probably not go to that trouble, as the phones operated perfectly well without making the security changes.Prof Alan Woodward, a security expert at the University of Surrey, said it was a "significant problem" and pointed out that by using online tools he was able to find many examples of phones that could be accessed using the method.The practice of using phone lines paid for by companies to make expensive calls for little or no fee is thought to be increasingly common, according to research by security consultancy Nettitude.
In a report last year, it said that the UK was particularly badly affected. Prof Woodward said the issue was similar to other flaws found in internet-connected devices and warned that with the rise of the Internet of Things, similar tricks were likely to become more and more common. "It's a huge wake-up call to anybody who's building devices with embedded software," he said. A spokeswoman for Snom said that the firm was investigating the issue.
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