VoIP Voice Spam
With the advancement in VoIP, spam has also encroached from our e-mails into our VoIP voicemail. ‘Spam’ which was a very common thing for any e-mail user has now started perturbing the VoIP users as well.
‘Spam over Internet Telephony’ or SPIT is much more deadly than its e-mail cousin. E-mail spam can only degrade the service and clog up the bandwidth which in turn can delay your useful mails by a few minutes. However, the VoIP spam hits the VoIP gateways directly which degrades the voice quality, which is something very upsetting for the end user. The open nature of a VoIP phone call makes it easy for spammers to send audio-commercials to people’s VoIP voice-mail inboxes. VoIP is completely insecure at the protocol level; there is no encryption and authentication. People can easily hack a caller ID and claim to be whomever they want. And since VoIP services aren’t regulated, customers aren’t entitled to the same rights and protections as standard phone users, consumer groups get. Any open, IP-based phone system could be a target of “spitters.” That includes such services as Free World Dialup, SIP phone, and Earthlink’s Free Online Calling program. Other services, such as Skype and Vonage would be more immune to such attacks because portions of those networks operate over a closed system that the spitters would have to hack. However any network architecture is vulnerable to hacker attack, in fact Skype users were subjected to an unsolicited Voice Broadcast Message earlier in 2004 following which the company quickly patched the loophole within a couple of days. Hence, the VoIP industry is very well aware of the potential for SPIT and a number of companies are developing solutions to address it, it will be interesting to see the future developments in this field.
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