In today’s world of cyber threats, as many have recently experienced, voice calling is not immune from cyber-attacks, for that matter it is a “honey pot” of sorts for bad actors. Very recently, these attackers have been able to utilize brute force Denial of Service attacks to hold some of the top telecommunications carriers with virtually unlimited resources hostage.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/voip-company-battles-massive-ransom-ddos-attack/
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article254588122.html
These carriers are not the only targets of such attacks – these bad actors randomly scan the internet for vulnerabilities and are looking to exploit any weaknesses they are able to find. “They are not distinguishing between a carrier or the consumer, only to wreak havoc and in many cases for financial gain holding customers information hostage in exchange for ransom.” says Abraham Lemmer, CEO and Founder of Compu-Phone.
What we are finding is that several VOIP deployment models leave customers at risk, especially those customers that combine their voice and data over a single network without taking the appropriate precautionary measures on an ongoing basis.
There are instances where hackers are able to penetrate a customer data network via their voice network and there are cases where the opposite holds true. Very often, hackers are targeting data networks with the intent to gain access to install ransomware on a customer’s server and/or compromise the customer’s voice network to transit illegal spam calls and drive up a customer’s phone bill.
At Compu-Phone, we have been placing separate networks at the physical layer as well as switching, with the intent to provide cleaner transport for better call quality and ease of troubleshooting a problem. By separating these networks, our customers have had a much better experience with Compu-Phone over other phone service providers since they do not have to deal with both voice and data competing for the same bandwidth, along with “finger pointing” between their voice and data vendors when there is a problem, says Lemmer.
Now, we have found that in this ever-changing world cyberthreats, cyberattacks & ransomware that keeping these networks separate enables us to securely lock down our customers networks, preventing hackers from any type of visibility into your voice network and providing our customers with a much higher level of service and support.
As a service provider to many industries/verticals, we understand what a cyberattack can mean to companies both small and large and what happens if a company is unable to service and support their customer base.