What You Need to Know About VoIP Security
In recent years the use of VoIP Technology has tremendously grown all thanks to the great cost effective and other hosted benefits that the technology offers. However, there are some drawbacks that come together with the benefits of VoIP just like any other Technology. Since VoIP technology solely relies on internet networking and infrastructure, VoIP services introduce security problems which have the potential to disrupt your VoIP calls along with your whole network. If you are considering switching to VoIP services, then it is significant that you recognise the potential drawbacks and what can be done in terms of getting the best practice to ensure that the implementation of VoIP is protected.
Dividing the VoIP wholesale career and data traffic
Most probably when you enter VoIP services it is going to share a network with your data. Therefore, your company will have to ensure that it has monitoring in place which can deduct any threats to the internal and external system.
Even though the organisation might have shared infrastructure it is always a good idea to maintain a certain degree of separation among your data and VoIP traffic. When you ensure that your VoIP traffic flows via proper network paths and through security devices like the VoIP ready firewalls, you cannot just keep it highly secure, but you can also reduce the performance problems.
This might involve having a dedicated virtual and subnet device for ensuring that the VoIP system always receives the bandwidth which it requires and that it is not suffering from contention with that applications.
This also helps in ensuring that the network admin has a clear view of the traffic flow, so they can set VoIP priorities.
DDoS attacks
VoIP technology is particularly vulnerable to the DDoS attacks particularly if you also run your PABX in the cloud. Majority of these attacks depend on hitting PABX with a large volume of a request in order to get it to work, where all the system can do is shut down the excess altogether. Further, if you are on the receiving end then this means there will be a loss of connectivity and which will lead to the loss of profits.
eventually, you can guard your system against this threat by employing some kind of voice and data traffic analysis. You can do it by identifying irregular patterns of a request and either block the attacker automatically or notify the admin to take the appropriate action.
Policy
This topic is incomplete without discussing the issue of policy. It is significant to discuss the guidelines for the use of VoIP technology and the monitoring system which can ensure that these are observed. In some industries for financial services, you might also need to follow particular compliance rules for instance recording calls and storing the data for a particular Fixed time.
Toll fraud
Another major issue with VoIP technology that users may face is of toll fraud. It involves hackers which steal time from your network in order to make phone calls on your account. Generally, this kind of attack begins with illegal access, so it is important to make sure that all your accounts are password protected and have strong passwords which are not used anywhere else. Furthermore, detection can also benefit by alerting you about any abnormal traffic patterns if there is an increase in a call to a familiar Geographic destination. In addition, you can use the admin function of your PABX to limit call destinations for users or a group of users.
