If your company relies on a VoIP phone for internal and external communication, there are innate vulnerabilities within your phone system that calls (pun intended) for immediate attention. Also, the more extensive is the use of a VoIP phone system, the more you need to deal with its vulnerabilities.
Let’s take a look at them:
1. Internet telephony vulnerability
When the voice packets are sent over the internet through less secure traffic, the packet loss could easily attract the packet sniffers' attention. To ensure that your VoIP traffic is secure, use a reliable VPN connection. This will require you to pool some additional resources, but it will all be worth the extra cost.
2. Old firewalls
Your VoIP is protected with hardware and software firewalls; however, old
firewalls are incapable of detecting VoIP services correctly and erroneously
block VoIP protocols. Make sure that you have an upgraded firewall that works with VoIP phone systems.
firewalls are incapable of detecting VoIP services correctly and erroneously
block VoIP protocols. Make sure that you have an upgraded firewall that works with VoIP phone systems.
3. Call tampering
If you experience regularly degraded phone calls or frequent distortion in your VoIP phone calls, it could be hackers attempting to access the information from your important phone calls. The mere annoyance that you experience is a hacker sending in additional data packets on the same path as that of your phone calls, resulting in packet loss, static, and distortions.
Call tampering can be taken care of with encrypted and authenticated IP phones.
4. Malware and viruses
Nothing that goes over the internet is safe from malware or viruses. And just like that, your VoIP calls are no exception. Such viruses add to the network signal congestion and could lead to poor bandwidth and call quality. With the worse kind of malware, your VoIP system could go offline.
However, malware and viruses don’t just cause network congestion; they pose more serious future threats by creating Trojan backdoors, allowing them to steal your information anytime they like. The only solution to have your systems protected from malware infestation is to have regular checkups of your VoIP system by IT experts. Alternatively, using a top-of the-line SOHO router like that from Asus could block malware in active mode.
5. DDoS Attacks
A distributed denial-of-service(DDoS) attack results in a complete breakdown of your VoIP phone system and happens when the attackers end up consuming all the bandwidth available in a data network. With SIP trunking, DDoS attacks on your VoIP could be minimized. However, to operate your VoIP system without compromising all of your data, it’s essential to segregate your voice and data traffic. You could use either VPN or encryption to ghettoize various aspects of your internet.
6. VOMIT
As disgusting as it sounds, Voice over Misconfigured Internet Telephones, aka VOMIT, is a software that aids stealers in siphoning information from a VOIP phone. This kind of attack can steal your vital business information, including phone numbers, bank information, and even passwords.
A private PBX system could incrementally decrease VOMIT attacks on your communication infrastructure.
A private PBX system could incrementally decrease VOMIT attacks on your communication infrastructure.
7. SPIT
Spam over IP telephony (SPIT) is spam but for your internet calls. It’s not just the additional nuisance for your VoIP phone system, tying it up in advertisements, but this kind of spam carries viruses and malware, too.
There’s no absolute way to identify spam on your VoIP system, but a firewall could help you diagnose spam to a certain extent.
8. Vishing
Vishing is a Caller-ID spoofing mechanism that lets fraudulent companies imitate phone numbers of legitimate firms to scam people systematically. Many times, the scam involves calling users about a possible suspicious activity on their credit cards and then tricking them into disclosing their sensitive info. Vishing is similar to email phishing, i.e., it’s hard to trace back to the scammer since most of these scams are international.
The best way to prevent Vishing at your workplace is to educate your teams on not disclosing sensitive information without supervision.
A VoIP phone system has its impending risks that can be minimized but not
completely eradicated. However, improving the security of your VoIP infrastructure could largely reduce the attacks.
completely eradicated. However, improving the security of your VoIP infrastructure could largely reduce the attacks.
Few ways to enhance your VoIP phone system
- Keeping your VoIP phone system updating for hardware and software at all times.
- Having relevant firewalls in place.
- Using a VPN for all your network connection
- Training your workforce not to share sensitive information with anyone without supervision.
- Cloud-based VPN is secure and affordable
Most cloud-based VoIP phone services offer the best VoIP security. One such hosted PBX provider is Axvoice. It comes with exclusive features and excellent network security. Axvoice also employs geo-redundancy that routes your calls through different servers, ensuring you never have downtime even if there’s a cyberattack. Axvoice also comes with the best end-point security and regular scans with help from their dedicated teams.
With Axvoice cloud-based VoIP, you can enjoy dozens of calling features for a fairly low price. For instance:
Enhanced Voicemail: You can access your voicemails not just through the dial phone but also via your online web account. This means you can take your voicemails anywhere and whenever you like without having to be bound to your office.
Call forwarding: As a successful business, you would never want to miss on any vendor’s or clients’ calls. That’s where Axvoice really helps. You can redirect your unattended phone calls to your cell phone and have them answered on the go.
Failover: Following up on the value of never missing out on any business calls, the Failover feature lets you take your calls on your phone in case there’s an ISP outage and you are no longer able to take your phone via your office phone.
Simultaneous Ring: With just one person taking care of the important phone calls, they are bound to miss some during their lunch or bathroom breaks. If you have Axvoice, you can take care of that with their Simultaneous Ring feature that makes multiple phones ring at the same time. This way, there’s at least someone to take the call.
Caller ID: It’s always good to know who’s calling you.
Call logs: Axvoice offers unlimited call logs that you could keep in your online account. If there’s a year-old phone log you want to dig into, Axvoice could help you with that.
Cloud-based VoIP phone systems are always miles ahead of your traditional VoIP phone systems. They aren’t just cheaper but securer. Moreover, they are scalable without any additional hardware.