For any business, no matter what their size, adopting VOIP phone services, there are dangers of which they need to be aware. VOIP telephony services are terrific, but they do involve a variety of security concerns. Although there are any numbers of such VOIP security threats, three of them are the most dangers and must be stopped, especially by smaller businesses. These include fraud, spit, and denial of service.
Fraud is a potentially severe problem for VOIP users. Of greatest concern to businesses is the premium rate fraud. In this type of fraudulent activity, the cyber criminal hacks into the business’ VOIP system in order to place numerous phone calls to premium rate numbers. This is not a new threat, as PBX’s have been susceptible to these types of malware attacks from the beginning. In the past, not too many individuals were capable of hacking into PBX’s.
Spit stands for Spam over the Internet Telephony. Spam has become such a problem in the last few years that both malicious and unsolicited email spam now comprises the vast majority of emails sent around the world. In Europe alone for 2010, thirty-seven billion spam messages, or sixty-two percent of the many European email messages, are expected to be dispatched each and every day. The very real fear lies in the possibility that VOIP will also suffer a similar fate. If the spammers determined to use this relatively new form of technology in order to get their marketing and messages out, then VOIP telephony would no longer be practical for use. This is especially true since emailing anti-spam techniques will not work for VOIP spam. The hope is that a number of new and different anti-spam solutions will be created. One new defense called VOIP Seal employs a group of means to identify spit. As a call comes in, the system investigates to learn if the call comes from a suspect source or not, in order to determine if it is spam.
The most significant and dangerous threat to VOIP security is the distributed Denial of Service attacks, also called DoS. These can be used to impact any device which is connected to the Internet. They work by overloading networks with server requests or spurious traffic. Since the assault is generated by numerous different machines which have been infected by malware or viruses, the enormous increase in traffic leads to the impacted servers being incapable of handling any legitimate requests. This causes the entire system to come to a screeching halt.
