VoIP Security Uncovered: 6 Major Risks & Effective Fixes

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a popular digital phone system that allows users to make and receive calls over the internet or broadband connection instead of traditional phone systems.

VoIP has been increasingly replacing traditional phone systems, and many businesses are also adopting it for its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and other benefits, like:

High scalability
Remote-friendly
Lower maintenance and installation costs
Premium features, like autoreply, voicemail, group broadcast, and business-friendly chat

However, despite its popularity and benefits, it also brings many VoIP security risks one can’t ignore. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, the cybercrime cost is estimated to rise from $6 trillion to $10.5 trillion between 2021 and 2025.

While these predominantly include cybersecurity attacks on digital systems like emails, VoIP services are also highly vulnerable to data breaches and cyberattacks.

This article will briefly discuss the common VoIP security risks and how to prevent them from protecting your critical business data and information.

6 VoIP Security Risks You Should Know

Making yourself aware of the different VoIP security issues is the first step towards preventing them in the first place.

Here are the most common VoIP security risks.

DDoS attacks

Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS attacks, happen when cyber criminals overwhelm servers with data and server requests, using up all the bandwidth.

When the server’s bandwidth gets exhausted, all the VoIP activities halt, affecting your business’s day-to-day operations.

Unfortunately, DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common, and hackers use advanced solutions and “zombie computers” to send a flow of traffic, congesting the VoIP system and slowing it down altogether.

Phishing

Phishing is one of the most common security issues of VoIP security, where cybercriminals pretend or pose as your website, bank authorities, or other key institutional representatives to get vital customer data and information.

This information allows them to access secure and protected systems, key business information, and resources. Phishing on calls is quite often, and VoIP-based phishing is often referred to as vishing.

Call tampering

Call tampering is when hackers or cybercriminals disrupt ongoing calls by injecting noise packets and sending a large volume of data into the VoIP phone system’s network.

Another way hackers tamper with calls is by delaying the transmission of data and information between the callers.

This call tampering affects the call’s quality, choppy call connections, long periods of silence, and the inability to have clear and seamless communication. Call tampering significantly affects an organisation’s ability to conduct business over call—negatively affecting the customer experience.

Malware attacks

Any data or application on the internet is at risk of malware injections—VoIP is no exception.

When injected into your VoIP phone network, malware consumes the network’s bandwidth, resulting in signal breakdown and affecting the quality of your calls.

Besides hampering your call’s quality, the malware also gives hackers and cybercriminals access to your entire business network, allowing them to steal sensitive information for malicious purposes.

VOMIT

Voiceover Misconfigured Internet Telephones or VOMIT refers to converting a telephonic conversation into a file to transfer and use for malicious uses.

This file allows hackers to access private and sensitive information and critical business data, like passwords, usernames, call logs and origin, and financial details.

SPIT

SPIT or Spam over IP Technology is VoIP’s version of email phishing attacks, where hackers and cybercriminals send pre-recorded and distorted voice messages to VoIP networks—causing disruptions in the network.

They clog and slow down the network, leading to virus and malware attacks.

The Solution: Zero Trust Security

Thus, as discussed above, the traditional solutions aren’t efficient and well-equipped to handle secure remote access by VoIP users, resulting in VoIP security issues like

Expose and compromise internal resources to external malicious users
Inability to restrict user access based on their device types, location, and the time of access
Ability to offer advanced features like access control and device posture checks
Lack of strong authentication and authorisation measures and visibility over the network and user activity

This is why adding secure remote access solutions, like Zero Trust security, to your company’s VoIP security policy is important.

Here’s how the Zero Trust approach can help you better strengthen your company’s VoIP security:

Zero Trust solutions ensure end-to-end encryption of all the data in transit, with seamless military-grade AES 256 encryption—improving the quality of the voice calls.
It integrates Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) capabilities to ensure only the right and authenticated users can access your company’s critical data—eliminating phishing and malware risks.
Zero Trust lets you benefit from a private channel on dynamic IP addresses connecting to the data centres and VoIP gateways—removing speed and latency issues.
Zero Trust offers complete visibility of your network, user activity, and call activity logs.
It allows you to frame contextual and customised access policies to allow or restrict access to critical business resources.
It lets you leverage additional security features and controls like geo-binding, geolocation, device posture checks, etc.—binding users to specific secure devices.

Thus, the Zero Trust security approach is amongst the best VoIP security tools to ensure data encryption and security against phishing, malware, DDoS attacks, and other important VoIP security threats.

Conclusion

VoIP security threats seem inevitable, but you can avoid them from affecting your business data and reputation by ensuring high VoIP data security and implementing security solutions like Zero Trust.