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Researchers uncover visitor management system vulnerabilities

Security

CIO Bulletin
2019-03-05

The visitor management systems have been becoming popular and are expected to be a market worth over $1 billion by 2025. But security researchers at IBM have reported that they have found vulnerabilities in many of these systems.

These researchers believe that these vulnerabilities can be used to steal visitor data. Further, these vulnerabilities could give people access to some sensitive and off-limit areas of a property. The team of researchers at IBM found a total of 19 vulnerabilities across these systems.

The researchers tested five most popular systems and found that each one of them had at least one vulnerability. These vulnerabilities allowed one to access and download someone’s visitor logs including names, DL, phone numbers, and Social Security data, and in some cases software could be used to get to the operating system.

The vendors of these systems were made aware of the existing vulnerabilities in their systems before making the information public. Commenting on these systems, IBM said that the visitor management systems can be used to identify legitimate visitors if used well but on the other hand, “if the systems are not working as intended, they can provide a false sense of security to the companies deploying them.”