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In computing, phoning home is a term often used to refer to the behavior of security systems that report network location, username, or other such data to another computer.
Phoning home may be useful for the proprietor in tracking a missing or stolen computer. In this way, it is frequently performed by mobile computers at corporations. It typically involves a software agent which is difficult to detect or remove.Technology Meetings Website - http://technologymeetings.com/ar/meetings_catch_laptop_thief/index.htm However, phoning home can also be malicious, as in surreptitious communication between end-user applications or hardware and its manufacturers or developers. The traffic may be encryption to make it difficult or impractical for the end user to determine what data are being transmitted.ZoneAlarm phones home, Apple throws Intel a bone
The Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear facilities was facilitated by phone-home technology, as reported by The New York Times.
Phoning home could also be for marketing purposes, such as the "Sony BMG rootkit", which transmits a hash of the currently playing CD back to Sony, or a digital video recorder (DVR) reporting on viewing habits. High-end computing systems such as mainframes have been able to phone home for many years, to alert the manufacturer of hardware problems with the mainframes or disk storage subsystems (this enables repair or maintenance to be performed quickly and even proactively under the maintenance contract). Similarly, high-volume copy machines have long been equipped with phone-home capabilities, both for billing and for preventative/predictive maintenance purposes.Xerox Model 1090 Copier/Duplicator User Guide. Xerox Corporation, Stamford, Connecticut and North York, Ontario, Canada, August 1990.
In research computing, phoning home can track the daily usage of open source academic software. This is used to develop logs for the purposes of justification in grant proposals to support the ongoing funding of such projects.
Aside from malicious activity, phoning home may also be done to track computer assets—especially mobile computers. One of the most well-known software applications that leverage phoning home for tracking is Absolute Software's CompuTrace. This software employs an agent which calls into an Absolute-managed server on regular intervals with information companies or the police can use to locate a missing computer.Absolute Software's website: http://www.absolute.com/
HTML e-mail messages can easily implement a form of "phoning home". Images and other files required by the e-mail body may generate extra requests to a remote web server before they can be viewed. The IP address of the user's own computer is sent to the webserver (an unavoidable process if a reply is required), and further details embedded in request can further identify the user by e-mail address, marketing campaign, etc. Such extra page resources have been referred to as "" and they can also be used to track off-line viewing and other uses of ordinary web pages. So as to prevent the activation of these requests, many do not load images or other web resources when HTML e-mails are first viewed, giving users the option to load the images only if the e-mail is from a trusted source.
Surveillance cameras Foscam have been reported by security researcher Brian Krebs to secretly phone home to the manufacturer.
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