Pardon me for a moment. I am a little hot under the collar thanks to this news.

First off, Asterisk is safe.

If you are using Asterisk or an Asterisk based phone system, IVR or one of the hundreds of different things you can do with Asterisk, you are safe. The likelihood that your system will be hacked and then turned into a phishing auto-dialer is about the same as the odds of your car being stolen then used to commit vehicular homicide.

Like John Todd (of Digium) stated in the article referenced above, the likelihood that “this could happen to you” (like the FBI wants you to believe), is slim. Couple that with the fact that your system should be protected by normal security measures and the reality of the situation is that this is something that is just not going to happen to you.

Now, I am not saying to completely blow this off, take a look at your systems security (like all other internal systems you use), but it is far more likely that scammers are setting up their own Asterisk boxes for these purposes, then taking over yours.

So, don’t believe everything the FBI says or what the media portrays – hopefully you realize that FUD is a great way to sell.