Voip

Preventive Measures of VoIP

With all the security issues arising from the usage of VoIP, companies are trying to develop prevention solutions to keep unwanted users away. Likely attacks that occur are hacker exploitation, worms, viruses, eavesdropping and spam, but more severe and common attacks are hijacking VoIP sessions and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Criminals would use hijacking sessions more because they could resell the information for a profit while DoS is more for extortion purposes and disabling a whole network. Like other companies, Top Layer Network has dealt with these attacks and has found a preventive solution, the Attack Mitigator IPS 5500.

The Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 is supposed to keep VoIP safe from harmful, destructive attacks. Once the device is installed, it automatically starts protecting the voice networks and completely inspecting all transactions. This hardware is known for its accuracy in detecting harmful attacks and is considered the best with DoS protection. Other companies that used the Attack Mitigator saw an increase in operational efficiency, elimination of call down time, better customer experience, an increase in network performance and in the long run, maximizing the companies revenues. This device is only one of many solutions companies can use to eliminate the more severe and harmful attacks, but there are cheaper alternatives that can solve some of the smaller, less destructive problems.

Other preventive measures companies are using are Layer 2 tunneling and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). By definition Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol (L2TP) is "an emerging Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard that combines the best features of two existing tunneling protocols: Cisco's Layer 2 Forwarding (L2F) and Microsoft's Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP). L2TP is an extension to the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), which is an important component for VPNs. VPNs allow users and telecommuters to connect to their corporate intranets or extranets (Cisco)." L2TP is one of the major building blocks for VPNs (virtual private networks) and allows security for people communicating with each other over the network.

Secure Sockets Layer was "originally developed by Netscape, to ensure security of data transported and routed through HTTP, LDAP or POP3 application layers. SSL is designed to make use of TCP as a communication layer to provide a reliable end-to-end secure and authenticated connection between two points over a network (for example between the service client and the server) (Window Security)." SSL is also used as protection with