Source: www.voip-news.com

The latest report from Light Reading’s VoIP Services Insider indicates that VoIP service providers aren’t taking the steps needed to prepare from impending security threats.

According to Light Reading:

VoIP Security: Vendors Prepare for the Inevitable examines applications in the VoIP security market, including security trends and the evolution of products, as well as target markets for VoIP security and the managed services strategies of various vendors. It also examines the outlook for the next 12 to 18 months for VoIP security, including threats the market faces, the impact of economic troubles, the buildout plans of various vendors, and the partnerships, investments, and acquisitions vendors have made. Finally, the report provides a comparative analysis of 12 of the top vendors in the VoIP security industry.

“Despite the hard lessons learned through security breaches in the earlier days of email and Internet, most VoIP users are not securing their networks adequately,” says Denise Culver, research analyst with Light Reading’s VOIP Services Insider and author of the report. “Some vendors believe this is a matter of VoIP users simply not understanding how to adequately secure their networks, while others believe it is necessary to better educate the VoIP marketplace about security issues, as well as create better tools to combat threats themselves.”

Always plan for the worst … seriously. To ignore that security threats will happen is like leaving your wallet on a subway.

Source: voipcentral.org

The VoIP revolution is only at its budding stage, poised to take the telecommunications market by storm. And now with big players jumping into the fray for grabbing a share that the VoIP bazaar offers; there is only one way for it to go upwards. Boom time for VoIP is just round the corner.

However, this can all come to a dud and the growth be impeded if the security threats it faces are not being identified and countermeasures taken before the damage is already done. Dangers lurk everywhere; whats more, the threats that the Internet faces every moment are the dangers VoIP will have to brace itself up for.

Chris Tech Corner has a great feature on VoIP security and its implications for VoIPs future. It cites specific VoIP and gives a few tips on how VoIP users can protect themselves.

The threats:

i. Conversation Degrading where someone has managed to attack and degrade the QoS
ii. Call Rerouting enabling someone to reroute traffic from a call and eavesdrop the conversation
iii. Intentional Interruption of Service commonly known as Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) where someone brings down a network by bombarding it with huge amount data where a large number of call requests are sent to a controller resulting in its shutdown or exhaust all of its resources (like bandwidth, talktime etc).

Steps VoIP consumers can take for protection:

As it is some distance still to be covered by VoIP to prevent attacks, so if you are a VoIP user you can do the following to minimize the potential threats.

i. Use VoIP on your internal network: By not allowing it to be sent across the Internet or other public networks, you can greatly reduce the risk of your data being intercepted or corrupted.
ii. Separate Voice and Data in your LAN: By putting your voice and data on separate VLANs, you will not only help improve the performance of your network but can protect your voice information a great deal from attacks targeted at the computers on the network. VLANs are usually difficult to break into without the use of special routing methods. So it makes it very difficult for the attacks to target the voice aspect of your network.
iii. Use Protocols Proprietary to the Equipment: By using an uncommon protocol that is proprietary to the equipment will often deter intruders (other than the determined ones of course) from attempting to break into your system.
iv. Do not share critical information on VoIP: This is the basic precaution you must take if you should happen to use VoIP across a public network. As far as possible, try not to share any critical information and as Chris puts it as practice common sense when speaking across a medium that can be so easily accessed by others.

Future of VoIP:

It would be foolish to panic now and shun VoIP in the face of potential threat VoIP faces today. In my opinion, it is the next best thing to have happened in the information technology front. Organizations like Voice over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) are working hard towards making VoIP as secure as it can be and their ongoing projects to better VoIP security like The Taxonomy Project show great promise. Soon they will have a standardized security plan that will take into account almost every threat currently facing VoIP today. Besides, big companies have big stakes on the future of VoIP, so they will be constantly working on VoIP security and stronger encryption. There are individual players also working on this like Phil Zimmermann. With a little caution from the VoIP users VoIP will become the dominant voice communication method in the near future.

Thanks Chris