* What if spammers start hitting voice systems?
We all know that “legitimate” spam is bad. We all know that phishing and spoofing are worse. But what about phishing and spoofing in a voice-over-IP system?
We all know that “legitimate” spam is bad. We all know that phishing and spoofing are worse. But what about phishing and spoofing in a VoIP system?
Imagine that you’re using a VoIP system and you get as many voicemails as you get spam messages in your e-mail inbox today? While we’re just in the beginning stages of VoIP, this is a very real possibility.
Attacks against VoIP systems today are where attacks against e-mail systems were in the mid-1990s – the potential for disaster is there. But in many ways this potential is far worse. For example, instead of receiving 100 spam messages at 10K bytes each every day, what would happen if you received 100 voicemails at 4M bytes each every day? What happens when your mom gets a call from her bank and she uses her caller ID to verify that it actually is the bank – but it’s really a phisher trying to get her account number and PIN code?
The potential for bringing down VoIP systems and stunting the growth of the market is very real, as is the enormous potential for fraud. These threats could make e-mail spam and phishing look like the “good old days” by comparison.
To address these concerns, BorderWare has announced SIPassure, the first appliance that focuses on Session Initiation Protocol-based threats for platforms and applications that use the SIP protocol, such as VoIP and instant-messaging systems. SIPassure, which is delivered in an appliance format, is being offered in both enterprise- and carrier-grade models. The system is designed to protect a SIP-based application from a variety of threats, including people or applications that can spoof a VoIP system, voice spam, hacking attacks, denial-of-service attacks and interception of VoIP or other SIP-based traffic.
To be sure, BorderWare is a bit ahead of things with SIPassure, much like implementing a full-blown anti-spam system would have been in 1993. There is virtually no voice spam over VoIP at this time and evidence that VoIP networks are being hacked is, at best, anecdotal. However, because SIP has security vulnerabilities, the onslaught of SIP-based attacks that will be headed your way is not a matter of if, but only of when.
