Tag Archive for: VoIP

IBM warns of rising VoIP cyber-attacks

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Cyber-attacks using the VoIP protocol Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) have been growing this year accounting for over 51% of the security event activity analyzed in the last 12 months, according to a report from IBM’s Security Intelligence group this week.

“SIP is one of the most commonly used application layer protocols in VoIP technology… we found that there has been an upward trend in attacks targeting the SIP protocol, with the most notable uptick occurring in the second half of 2016,” IBM wrote. “In actual attacks on VoIP communications, we note various types of disruption. Spikes in July and September were mostly the result of specially crafted SIP messages that were terminated incorrectly. Persistent, invalid messages are known to cause vulnerable servers and equipment to fail. The spike in October 2016 was largely influenced by SIP messages with invalid characters in the SIP “To” field. These could be reflective of suspicious activity, necessitating further investigation.”

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Network World Security

Vetting vendors via VoIP

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Who among us hasn’t set up a new and unique email account for a particular commercial transaction just so we’ll know who to blame when the account gets flooded with spam? Well, a member of Reddit’s community devoted to systems administration (r/sysadmin) says he took the tactic a step further … actually, 12 steps further.

From a post headlined: “How to get blacklisted as a vendor.”

Yesterday I was hunting for a new vendor. Mostly out of curiosity (but also to help me in picking a company that’s not completely sleazy) I set up a batch of temporary phone numbers in our VoIP system, 12 in all, and called each vendor from a different number.

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Network World Paul McNamara

FCC grants VoIP service providers equal access to telephone numbers

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Some of you may not have known this was controversial, but the FCC this morning announced that going forward VoIP service providers such as Vonage will no longer be second-class citizens when it comes to the doling out of telephone numbers.

From an FCC press release:  

The Federal Communications Commission today modernized and streamlined its rules governing the distribution of phone numbers by leveling the playing field for interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers, which are increasingly popular with consumers.

Interconnected VoIP providers – defined as those capable of placing and receiving calls to and from the traditional phone network — currently must get numbers from third-party carriers.  Allowing these providers to go directly to numbering administrators for phone numbers will benefit consumers by reducing costs and promoting additional competition from these innovative VoIP providers, the FCC found.

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Network World Paul McNamara

Patent wars over wiretapping VoIP & surveillance backdoors into Internet chats

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After Microsoft acquired Skype, we looked at a Microsoft patent called “Legal Intercept” meant for monitoring and recording VoIP communications. At that time, there were questions about if Microsoft would ruin Skype by making a backdoor for easy spy and pry government and law enforcement access.
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