TOP 5 VOIP Threats in 2007& How to safeguard from them

With the recent increase in VOIP hacking, Its very important for VOIP providers and users to ensure that they are safe from the probable attack.

I have covered several articles recently about Skype Threats & how to encrypt your VOIP calls to keep hackers out.

This article is mainly discussing possible voip threats to users & providers in 2007 and in coming years.

1) Inter-Company Toll Frauds: Where an outsider and an employee of a VOIP company get together and run a Toll-free VOIP business but charges the customers. Providers get 0 money since the employee routes all the call from provider's phone and outsider uses a toll-free to connect to the employee.

2) Message Interception: A user can intercept the message sent to another user and track your SIP No. & other information.

3) Enumerating: Sending direct random information to registrar servers to find information about other registered users.

4) DOS Attacks: Denial of service attacks using proxies and manipulated header info.

5) Virus/Worms: Last but not the least. Worms and Virus will be on the loose in VOIP space in future.

So beware, its time to tighten the security and go extra step further to do our best to save ourself from such attacks.

For home users, we could follow some simple guidelines to avid such attacks if not 100% they can still be effective.

1) If you are home VOIP user, dont get calls from anyone (stranger), Dont accept a call not from your contacts. Instead try to chat with him first before starting a call to verify his identity.

2) Use secure VOIP clients which can sit on top of your favorite VOIP clients. Zfone is one such application which can encrypt your call.

3) Update your antivirus software regularly. if you do it religiously, most of the virus & worms wont harm you.

If you can think about any other point, please feel free to add it in comments. I will make an honest attempt to add it to this article.

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