Net Phone Customers Brace For 'VoIP Spam'

XaviorPenguin writes "If you think that Spam in your e-mail inbox is bad, wait until VoIP gets huge! According to a News.CNet.com story, your voice mail box on your Net Phones may be cluttered with ads for Viagra. '"The fear with VoIP spam is you will have an Internet address for your phone number, which means you can use the same tools you use for e-mail to generate traffic," said Tom Kershaw, a vice president at security specialist VeriSign. "That raises automation to scary degrees."' If you think that is scary, you know the Do-Not-Call list that is out by the FTC, yeah, um, people with Net Phones may not be affected by this list and spammers/telemarketers may take this advantage for themselves. "

Comments

Not a single sales call.

[johankohler]

Well so far Vonage is great.

Ive been a subscriber for 3 years and have not recived a single sales call.

I belive I have recived about 10 calls that got the wrong number.

Odd....

[Laivincolmo]

I'm not sure if I'm an exception to the case, but I never get any spam. If I get a voip address, I'll just use the same methods I do now. Create a dummy account for signups, be careful how I post my address on the internet, etc.

Re:sigh...

[LostCluster]

It's a difference in business models. Most phone telemarketers were operating legal businesses, so when laws made it imposible for them to operate they simply went out of business.

Meanwhile, spammers are usually already immoral people who have no respect for the law anyway. Viagra, afterall, is illegal to sell without a proper perscription, and a contact via web form is simply not good enough to generate such a perscription. So, their offer is already illegal to begin with... another law on top of that making the communication illegal isn't going to affect them much.

Re:Pay by the minute? EEK!

[dejamatt]

Some of the companies, foolishly, make you listen to an entire voicemail message before deleting it (in the cell phone world Cingular does this too)

FYI: On my Cingular phone, 7 is the erase button after a message, but if you push 7-7 during a message it will stop playback and erase it. Don't know if it works on all phones/plans or just mine.

Re:Back door...

[Tmack]

OK, I know virtually nothing about VoIP, but I'm betting I'm right here... wouldn't that also block legitimate calls from others using VoIP phones?

No, because while they all use VoIP, they themselves are not (yet) interconnected. Even if they were, the only call switch that your phone should talk to is the one hosted by your provider, since it is the determining factor as to where calls go, and all voice packets are routed through their network anyways.

The individual providers still need a way to interconnect to all other providers, and currently the only way to do that is via POPs (points of presence) and SS7 trunks to the POTs network. Generally once traffic is determined to not be on the CLEC's local network, its passed out to whoever they connect to to handle outbound routing, be it VoIP or not. I doubt any serious LEC would use the internet as a major interconnect with another provider. The security risk alone is too much of a risk.

Also note that not all providers currently use the same protocol (as has been mentioned in other posts), so even if someone spoofed a call from your provider, they would have to know how to talk to your phone, be it MGCP or SIP or something else.

Just because your phone "has an world reachable IP address" doesnt mean it is wide open to attacks. I think the most serious issue to be dealt with will be DOS attacks, since most IVoIP (internet VoIP, ala Vonage.. as opposed to internal VoIP on private networks) cannot control their QOS between customer and callswitch.

tm