Voice Over IP Security entails a number of steps you should take to make sure your voice over internet protocol telephone calls are secure. Read this article to learn how you can protect your VOIP with voice over IP security measures including antivirus software, SPIT, and more.
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. This is a means of carrying phone calls without using the older Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). As digital telephony has grown in popularity and as the capabilities of VoIP phones have grown, the use of an Analog Telephone Adaptor (ATA) to turn a broadband connection into a telephone network has been the choice of more and more individuals and businesses.
Like every other technology, Voice over IP has its security issues. To beef up your Voice over IP security, here are some things to be aware of and some steps to take:
- With a growing network of computers infected by viruses or malware and used to participate in Distributed Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, it is important to make sure your computers are clean before linking your VoIP phone service to them so that you don’t put your phone connectivity at risk. This means maintaining up-to-date antivirus software and having a good firewall setup, as well as employing an anti-spam tool to limit malware arriving by email.
- Besides the risk from viruses and malware, the very fact that VoIP calls are carried over the Internet creates security risks that don’t exist with calls transmitted through the PSTN.
- SPIT (Spam over Internet Telephony) is spam that overwhelms a phone number with voicemails. The phone calls are dialed automatically and pre-recorded.
- Unless a VoIP solution is encrypted, and not all are, the calls made on it are open to eavesdropping. For anyone interested in keeping their data secure, a system with encryption is important, whether on a softphone or a handheld model. There are free, open-source solution that are known as Public Secure VoIP.
- In 2009, a search query exposed Google Voice voicemail that had been crawled and indexed by Google’s bots has been dealt with by a change to the protocols, according to a Google employee responding to a Help Forum query on September 29, 2009.
- It is also important to assess the security of the website from which you order your VoIP service. You should find that it has the lock and green address bar on pages that are supposed to be secure, as well as some indication that the site is secure, such as a Thawte secure site emblem, a McAfee Secure emblem with a testing date, etc.
- If your VoIP service is connected to a router, you should make sure that steps have been taken to make the router as secure as possible. For example, this includes changing the default user name and password that the router came with and choosing an appropriate type of Wireless Security Mode if you are using a wireless network, i.e., not WEP—Wired Equivalent Privacy, but WPA—Wi-Fi Protected Access. Make sure to save your changes before exiting the router management program.