The first signs of trouble at National Regulatory Services, a small consulting firm in Connecticut, were a series of odd complaints from customers that their phone messages were not being returned--the electronic equivalent of a slap in the face.
Sales agents at the company were stumped by the complaints since they could never remember receiving the phone messages in the first place. Helplessly, they watched as their business dwindled and customers drifted away to competitors who, presumably, at least returned their phone calls.
It took months of digging before the company finally figured out that a former employee was tapping into the voice-mailbox of the salesman he had once sat next to and deleting calls from potential customers, whom he would then call on his own.
By the time the man was convicted last year, the damage had been done: an estimated $1 million in lost business and an incalculable loss in the sense of privacy and security for those who worked at the company.
"E-mail, phone, voicemail--I use them, but I don't put anything proprietary on them anymore," said Jacqueline Hallihan, the president of National Regulatory Services. "It's changed the way I do everything. I sit there sometimes and still wonder . . . who is listening?"
Within the last handful of years, the walls of electronic privacy that had been so intricately constructed through technology have crumbled with an alarming regularity.
Voicemail once seemed to be a trivial corner of modern communication, made up of endless messages in the game of phone tag or spousal reminders to please call home.
But voicemail has proved to be a gaping hole of vulnerability, not so much for technical reasons but for human ones--easily guessed passwords, careless password handling or no passwords at all.
Although there is a wide variety of voicemail systems, in general they all have security features that protect messages and passwords--some even from the designers of the machines. Systems can be set up to lock mailboxes if they detect a trial-and-error attempt to discover passwords. The passwords in most systems are also usually hidden and encrypted so they would be unreadable even to someone with the deepest computer access.
