Source: LinkedIn
The recent hacks against Sony Pictures have prompted most businesses to take security measures to protect their own corporate IP networks. However, in this process IP Phone systems have been almost completely overlooked and thus left unprotected.
Unfortunately most business owners do not realize the devastating impact of a phone hack until it’s too late.
Common Hacks
The majority of all IP phone threats are in the form of leveraging your phone system for outbound long distance calling. Hackers will relay their long distance calls over your phone network to avoid paying high costs to expensive calling areas, while your company picks up the tab.
For example, the average cost of a phone call to Cuba from US or Canada is about seventy cents per minute. If hackers were calling across one phone line for twenty-four hours, this would cost your business over $1,008.00 per day. Due to the nature of this hack, a business will remain unaware of the breach to their system until they receive their monthly statement with costs soaring in the tens of thousands of dollars.
The real danger of this hack is that most major telecom companies will deem the account holder liable for any usage coming from their equipment. Simply put, if your phone system is making those calls, fraudulent or not, you are completely liable for those charges.
How They Get In
While IP data networks are usually the most vulnerable to attacks, IP Phone systems remain an easy target. Automated port scanners scour the internet for known ports that business phone systems use, such as port 5060 which is the most widely used SIP protocol. Once these ‘bots’ find an open port, they automatically begin bombarding the phone system with brute force attempts to access the internal network. As soon as hackers gain access to your phone system, the calls almost immediately start relaying through.
The Telair Difference
At Telair Communications we employ a variety of countermeasures to deter and eliminate cyber threats to our IP phone systems. Using tools such as port scanning and malicious bot recognition algorithms within our firewalls to help detect and stop any potential threats in real time. Should a customer’s phone system experience a security breach outside our protected network, our systems would still recognize, notify and cease international outbound traffic to ensure that little or no costs are incurred.
Telair’s managed solutions protects against cyber threats to our IP phone systems and ensures the safest and most secure phone network for our customers.
Call or email Telair today to find out if your phone network is protected.
1-855-TELAIR-1 (835-2471) | info@telair.ca
https://www.telair.ca