Phish and Spam Over VoIP
VoIP was initiated some ten years ago. It came in use since the mid of 1990′s so there is hardly anyone left who doesn’t know about VoIP. Today more and more people and large businesses are connecting over high speed Internet connection as compared to early 1990s where the internet users only had access to the normal dial-up internet connection. Those business forms that had access to broadband during early era should pay very high fees for their dedicated connection. A desire for broadband internet connection was necessary for better performance when compared to uncomfortable dial-up connection which would be make regular routine work a painful job.
VoIP services became popular and came into light since the availability of affordable Broadband Internet connection offered by broadband providers. Now even normal people have broadband access. VoIP so has become a necessity or an important Internet Product. Both Internet Broadband service providers and the telecommunications companies are now providing VoIP service with fierce competition on price and the feature set. Don’t forget with so much VoIP usage increasing day by day, regular users are targets for spammer and hackers.
There are number of bad things spreading about the VoIP phones and of course they are not taken that seriously. In reality, so many researches have been conducted to understand communication over the VoIP phone. As per the result, every company has listed VoIP phone in the 4th place out of the seven threats that are going to hit their networks and computer for the year 2007. Other reports have also specified that VoIP is going to be the main area of concentration for the hackers and other spammer around the world.
Hackers are extremely intelligent people as the name says it all. Since VoIP uses IP protocol for the communication, it’s quite easy to exploit a known vulnerability leading access and control over a VoIP system as hackers are specifically trained to make good use of any such loop hole found in an enterprise network. VoIP is enable to adapt with older and the existing firewalls which is the greatest weakness of VoIP. Even though enterprises uses a mix of both hardware and software based firewalls to secure there corporate networks, they tend to leave one or two voids calling for trouble. Any hacker could throw away irrelevant traffic data streams causing the firewall to reach the boiling point of there processing limit, causing an ultimate buffer overflow or crash stopping any more processing of packets.
Its not necessary to say that your data or voice can easily be exposed to outside threats in any form even if your firewalls are less strengthen to secure other files or folders, until the time someone specifically know the entry point. VoIP packets can be captured using different utilities available on the internet to listen to your ongoing VoIP call. Several investigations and tests have proved that it’s extremely easy to hear a call. And at other point inject noise or spam in an ongoing conversation is not also a hard think. This is being extremely used to earn it as “spit”. Spit has attracted so many other peoples called scammers, not just the spammers and hackers. Investigations and researches have find out that hackers even uses the certain phishing like things over the VoIP network using the interactive voice responses of the original companies, banks or the credit card provider companies. It’s really easy to scam using automated voice response system to do transaction in real and in fact you may be talking directly with the scammer system.
There are several security methods provided by the service providers, but the challenge is to implement them correctly. That is a common problem that the providers are facing today. Hewlett-Packard like companies is now forbidding their peoples from talking sensitive or the important conversation using VoIP. There are so many big corporations who’ve suggested similar reasons and have implemented policies to prevent their employees from communicating any sensitive information over VoIP. You may call your banks and other financial institutions and start talking about your account over your VoIP phone, which might turn out to be a disaster later. For any such use, feel free to use your traditional analog telephone line which is considerably less risky.
Of course it feels really great to save up on call expenses when talking to your known people living far away from you using VoIP, but at the same time, you might just want to know how secure your VoIP conversation is. Ask your Internet Service Provider today…
