Subject: Ditch Your Phone Bill with Home & Business VoIP Phone-Systems

From: "VoIP Business Phones" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2015 07:46:03 -0700

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cases, they even sell your connection information on the black market. Once inside your home network, hackers can poke around to uncover sensitive information you may have stored on your PC. Net and power reliant. Any time your Internet service or power goes down, so will your VoIP service. Not being able to make outgoing calls from your home phone in case of an emergency is a risk, so make sure you always have a charged cell phone as a backup. Shoring up the Risks VoIP communication offers a great value and comes with many cool features--just make sure to deploy it securely by taking these precautions: Equipment security. Select VoIP equipment that uses current wireless security standards such as Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), WPA2, and IEEE 802.11i. Avoid relying on Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security--it's an older and less secure technology. Authentication and encryption. Turn on any authentication and encryption features available with your VoIP system. This will help kee
p unauthorized people out of your network and ensure privacy for your calls. WPA, WPA2, and IEEE 802.11i devices all come equipped with advanced encryption and authentication technology. VoIP firewall. Use a firewall specifically designed for VoIP traffic. The firewall will identify unusual calling patterns and monitor for signs of attack. Two connections. If feasible, have a separate Internet connection for your VoIP line, so viruses or attacks threatening your data network will not affect your phone. Up-to-date antivirus. Use up-to-date antivirus and antispam technology on your devices. Awareness. You can act as a solid line of defense by being on the lookout for strange activities on your VoIP line and by being familiar with techniques attackers use. Conclusion Broadband Internet connections have become almost ubiquitous, making VoIP a possibility in more places than ever. VoIP is attractive because of its low fixed cost that includes a number of extra calling features, but it do
es come with some risks, as you've learned here. Once you know the pros and cons, you can determine if you should let security fears stand between you and VoIP. If you decide to try VoIP, be sure to take the precautions mentioned here. With most major telecommunications carriers currently in the process of readying Voice-over-IP (VoIP) services for mass deployment, it???s clear that IP telephony is finally headed for prime time. However, the promise of mass VoIP consumption also increases the risk of widespread security violations, spawning a new sense of urgency to fill in potential security gaps now before hackers wreak havoc on corporate voice networks. Until now, VoIP security has been easily overshadowed by the attractiveness of this new technology and the extensive features it promises to provide. Security hasn???t been a particularly critical subject since in the past, most IP voice traffic remained on local and wide area enterprise networks, which were more or less secure an
d protected from the public Internet. But as VoIP usage is becoming widespread and Internet telephony is coming into play, enterprises and home users are becoming subject to the same security risks that have affected data networks for decades, thus opening the door to a whole new realm of security risks. This is largely due to the fact that next-generation voice networks are IP-based and all IP protocols for sending voice traffic contain flaws. Who Is At Risk? An Internet environment can be considered particularly hostile for VoIP deployments for a number of reasons. Most important is that attacks are not traceable and the whole network is exposed to all sorts of spoofing and sniffing. There have never been enough safeguards and protection in an Internet environment for it to be considered safe, and the potential vulnerability to danger of devices communicating on the Internet makes security threats commonplace. This signifies that any VoIP device communicating insecurely in an Inte
rnet environment is at the risk of security breaches. What sorts of vulnerabilities exist? Let???s start with the basics. Because most VoIP traffic over the Internet is unencrypted, anyone with network access can listen in on conversations. Eavesdropping is one of the most common threats in a VoIP environment. Unauthorized interception of audio streams and decoding of signaling messages can enable the eavesdropper to tap audio conversations in an unsecured VoIP environment. To put it simply, imagine John in the mailroom overhearing your CEO and HR director discussing the latest round of layoffs. Or how about listening to Bob giving his credit card number to an airline booking attendant? All the eavesdropper needs is a packet capture tool (freely available on the Internet) to start capturing voice traffic on the network. Then he can save it in a nice wav file and take it home. Convenient isn???t it? But that???s just the tip of the iceberg. Hackers can spoof SIP messages and IP addre
sses and hijack whole conversations. The attacker could masquerade as a user, forging the real identity of the client, which implies that the receiver cannot be sure of the identity of the transmitter. Sounds interesting? Or imagine a man-in-the-middle attack where your customer ends up talking to an organized crime syndicate masquerading as your telesales group. Your customer???s