VOIP Security Guide

Revolutionizing the world of telephony, VoIP has become one of the fastest growing technologies of today. It has quickly gobbled up the market for the traditional and well established tools for communicating over large distances, by making them look antiquated and expensive.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is basically a process which converts your voice into digital signals that travel over internet. Its most prominent feature is its affordability. With VoIP you can make long distance calls at a fraction of cost that you used to pay to your telephone companies. It is primarily because of the fact that transferring digital signals over internet is quite cheaper than transferring analog signals over the traditional telephone lines.

However, nowadays VoIP is in the news not for the great savings in long distance calls that it offers but for the security concerns attached to it. As VoIP runs through internet, the information exchanged can be intercepted by anyone at any time. Moreover, because of its popularity VoIP has become a soft target for the hackers. In the absence of a strong firewall system, hackers may capture sensitive information such as credit card number and bank details. They can even launch denial of service attacks and shut down a voice conversation, or send spam or virus over the internet to disrupt the services. Another vulnerability that the IT sector is worried about the hacking of VoIP networks for making free calls. According to industry sources, a new generation of