We do not normally provide security alerts but since we have several articles on this site dealing with tweaks to Asterisk and FreePBX, we thought we would just pass this along. If you are a FreePBX Distro user, go read this thread and this security notice now. You should particularly do this if you are noticing high CPU usage.

The problem is that there is an exploit in the FreePBX Distro caused by a piece of software that turns itself on when installed. Some users want it, but many have never heard of it and don’t use it, so it should be turned off by default. One side effect of this software is that it has given attackers a way to install and run bitcoin mining software on affected PBX’s, which can degrade performance and increase power consumption. It’s a simple fix to keep this from happening, so do it now!