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VoIP's Security Vulnerabilities
garzpacho writes "Experts predict that attacks on VoIP systems could be right around the corner, and are calling for preemptive security measures. The BusinessWeek article compares the current state of voice-over-IP to the pre-spam email era and suggests that spammers could be the first to exploit the system. From the article: 'Here's what VoIP security breaches could mean for consumers. For starters, it's a big channel for spammers. Think of the Viagra ads that flood your e-mail inboxes now. They work because the cost of e-mailing thousands of people at once is so low, only 1% to 3% or so need to respond for it to be worth it, Ingevaldson says. Comparable economics apply to VoIP calls, he says. Then there are potential phishing attacks, where fraudsters posing as banks lead consumers to fake sites. Those and other attempts at identity theft could spring up via VoIP accounts too, experts say. Imagine the messages from relatives of deposed Nigerian dictators -- only this time they're on voice mail, too.'"
To actually fall for that Nigerian one... my God!
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All high-speed Internet providers that I have ever had (Comcast, Yahoo/SBC/AT&T) suffer outages periodically - say, about once every two months for several hours on the average, and this is only the outages that I know about, since I don't use my home computer all the time. Happens at work too - at one time our business DSL was out for two days (thank you "new" AT&T). The electrical power has also been out several times. At the same time I don't remember a single problem with my land line. Note that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so this is a relatively high-tech place.
You end up depending on both consumer-grade Internet service and electrical power, neither of which is completely reliable. Which is probably OK, esp if you have your cell phone, so I am not advocating against Vonage.
However it strikes me that people generally do not realize that the Internet connection (as the Internet itself) is not completely reliable. At a trade show a sales person was trying to convince of the benefits of their credit card authorization software, which resides on their own server and is accessible as a web service. The idea is that the consumer pays for a service (e.g. in a hair salon) in advance and then gets to use it for a period of time. Not bad stuff, actually, but that is beside the point. When I told her that I am worried about reliability in case the internet connection is down and the customer will not be able to be authorized for the service they already paid for, she looked at me silly and said: "Ihe Interned connection down ? Does that ever happen?" Duh! It happens!