As VoIP becomes more prevalent, its popularity will undoubtedly attract some unwanted attention -- spammers and phishers looking for their next scheme. Here is a look at some common forms of VoIP abuse, including VoIP spam and caller ID spoofing, and how you can fight back.
Voice over IP (VoIP) technology provides many advantages to companies and individuals over both traditional telephone services and traditional IP communications. But, like other technologies, it also brings with it the potential for abuse. And as more people implement VoIP, we can also expect more frequent exploitation of this potential.
One growing concern is the possibility that unwanted VoIP advertising messages -- often referred to as SPIT (spam over Internet telephony) -- will overwhelm IP voice systems, much like e-mail spam has overwhelmed e-mail messaging systems. Over the years, spam has reduced much of the functionality of e-mail -- dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of unwanted e-mail messages clogging up servers and users' inboxes to the point of driving many users away from e-mail entirely.
While SPIT hasn't yet become a major problem, experts anticipate that it could do so in the future, as the increasing popularity of VoIP makes it a more attractive target. Let's look at the potential misuses of VoIP and what you can do to protect your business.
How SPIT works
We've long had to deal with annoying telemarketers on our
landlines, so how is SPIT different? The problem is that a VoIP line isn't just
a telephone number -- it's also an IP address.
Auto-diallers used by traditional telephone advertisers must dial each phone number separately. But VoIP spammers can do their dirty work much more efficiently: They can harvest a large number of IP addresses, record an advertising message, and then send the message to hundreds or thousands of VoIP voice mail boxes all at once in bulk -- just like e-mail spammers.
In addition, it's more difficult to track the origin of VoIP calls vs. public switched telephone network (PSTN) calls, so spammers who are also scammers are harder to catch. And using a VoIP line, the spammer can call from anywhere in the world at a much lower cost than using traditional phone lines.
Why PSTN users aren't safe either
Of course, spammers using VoIP can also make calls to PSTN
numbers, so the SPIT phenomenon poses a risk not just to VoIP users themselves,
but to all telephone customers. In fact, VoIP users may actually be able to
protect themselves more easily than PSTN users since VoIP services usually
include free voice mail, caller ID, and other features that you may have to pay
extra for with a PSTN line.
One danger of SPIT, for both VoIP and PSTN call recipients, is the possibility of flooding voice mail boxes with spam messages. Full voice mail boxes prevent legitimate callers from leaving messages, resulting in voice mail denial of service (DoS). With the potential to create much larger file sizes than e-mail text spam, audio messages can take up a lot more storage space and overwhelm systems more quickly.
But SPIT isn't just about leaving messages -- it's also about making live calls. Because of the difficulty of tracing these callers and the low cost to make the calls, it's a good possibility that phishers will latch onto VoIP to perpetuate their scams. Many people are more likely to trust a phone call claiming to be from a bank or credit card company than an e-mail message, so this is another potential misuse of VoIP.
Of course, you can use features already included with most VoIP accounts to help control spam and phone phishing. For example, you can reject all messages that don't provide caller ID information.
The bad news is that it's possible to spoof caller ID to make a call look as if it's coming from a different source. In fact, caller ID spoofing is another misuse of VoIP that will benefit not just spammers but other malicious callers as well.
All VoIP articles over the past decade contain the following statement (or similar) "VoIP can save organisations money and make calling more convenient". To date, I've not really seen any evidence of this and in fact, the contrary. I've been in the voice/data integration space since the late eighties (TDM, Frame, ATM, TCP/IP) and back then there were substantial savings to be made. I'll agree that TCP/IP trunking can save money but most of these savings have been erroded by dsl and call minute plans.
Given that the catch cry for VoIP is cost, I'd like to see the numbers for real implementations that include all the costs. Include infrastructure, maintenance, support reliability, quality etc.
I also know from experience that VoIP is not a good sales tool as voice quality issues will hinder sales effectiveness. You can usually tell if a call centre is VoIP as it sounds like the operator is calling from the moon! Personally, I just hang-up when dealing with VoIP enabled support centre's with quality issues (and this includes the biggest IP router vendor's site)
Am I the only person out there with concerns over the marketing of this technology?