Practice SIP Safely


I just read an amusingly titled article about practising safe SIP.

This is a witty title but also a good analogy when you consider that computers can get diseases in the same way that humans do.

Therefore there are a lot of decisions to be made and risks to be recognised when setting up VoIP. VoIP and SIP Trunking is incredibly useful for fast and cost efficient communication. However any such system is always at risk of being corrupted, and if it is corrupted there is a lot of important data at stake.

You only have to look at the events over at gossip website Gawker recently when hackers managed to access more than 1 million user passwords through a security breach. It is thought that there are many more infiltrations which are not reported due to embarrassment on the part of the company. The cost of these breaches is significant.

When you are considering the advantages of virtual PBX hosting, you should also keep in mind the risks. These include denial of service attacks and the exposure of network vulnerabilities. IP telephony is a particularly good target because there are so many endpoints as well as weak infrastructures created by the transition to IP communications.

It is up to sellers, value added resellers, IT professionals and users to make the system as secure as possible with high security passwords to prevent it being compromised.

An authority on the subject Dan York wrote a book entitled the Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks. He identifies the weak spots as being in applications, integration and equipment. That includes PBXs, database access and the integration of video into your VoIP or UC system.

Yet there are a number of Session Border Controllers firms which offer managed VoIP security solutions such as AudioCodes and Sipera. They could be a worthwhile investment.

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