A Miami hacker has admitted he pocketed more than $1m by selling millions of minutes of voice over IP calls and surreptitiously routing them through the networks of telecommunications companies.

Edwin Andrew Pena pleaded guilty to two felonies in connection with the hacking spree, which spanned the years 2004 through 2006, according to court documents. He was apprehended last year in Mexico after skipping out on a $100,000 bond secured by the mother of his then girlfriend.

Pena appeared in US District Court in New Jersey on Wednesday and pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and unauthorized access to a protected computer. He faces a maximum of 25 years in federal prison and fines of at least $500,000 at sentencing, which is scheduled for May 14.

Pena and cohort Robert Moore were arrested in June 2006 and accused of carrying out an elaborate scheme that routed more than 10 million minutes of VoIP calls over the networks of a dozen or so telecommunications providers without their permission. They breached the networks by using brute-force attacks that deduced the security telephone prefixes needed to gain access.

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They first observed an increase in VoIP vulnerabilities during the end of 2006 and that trend has continued through today.

They credit part of this increase to better tools for finding VoIP vulnerabilities, yet this upward trend should be largely attributed to the growing number of VoIP installations.

Protocol-level attacks

Eavesdropping
Eavesdropping attacks can occur because the media transport protocol that carries the conversation lacks encryption in many default configurations. This is the case when using RTP as the media transport layer. For a superior solution, you should use secure RTP (SRTP), which provides both encryption and authentication.

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