Protecting Your Business against SIP Fraud

Are you not convinced about upgrading your phone systems to SIP trunking? Do you feel apprehensive when it comes to using SIP trunking because of the recent rise in the number of frauds related to SIP trunking?

SIP trunking is an essential tool for maintaining an efficient and updated telephone system or a business. It helps your business to maintain location independence and at the same time lead to huge cost savings – on an average you can save up to 40%. SIP trunking has recently been a subject of debate among the CTOs and engineers. The primary concern with this technology is its vulnerability to frauds and hacks. Companies have lost thousands of dollars when they had to pay hefty bills without even using the carrier’s service. Two questions that often haunt the current users of SIP trunking are:

1. Is there a way to protect their SIP trunking system from hackers and fraudsters?
2. Is ISDN more secure than SIP?

Before we answer these questions, let us dig deeper and find out what SIP fraud is all about.

For people like you and me, who really do not understand how exactly SIP fraud takes place, here is a snapshot of what actually happens.

Your SIP trunk system connected with the telephone line is accessed by an unauthorized individual or an intelligent system. Now, the hacker is able to make numerous outgoing calls to anywhere around the world and even to other mobile devices while the telephone bills to your company keep increasing.

Just the way a company tries to protect its computer network system connected to the internet, they have to take some special measures to ensure the prevention of unauthorized access to their telephone system. If you are not able to protect your telephone system from IP attacks then you will end up paying hefty bills at the end of every billing period. The catch is that SIP providers will never bear the cost of protecting your SIP trunk system. You will be compelled to pay the bills, even though you were completely in the dark about the expensive calls made using your system.

Here is a list of measures that you need to take in order to protect your telephone system from SIP fraud:

Keep changing the password at regular intervals – You will need to change the default passwords provided with the system. Keep changing the passwords at regular intervals so that it gets tougher for miscreants to use old passwords for breaking into your system.

Limit call hours: You can set the time for making calls from the system, which certainly would only be the business hours of your office. This will help you track the calls and fraudsters will be forced to carry out their attacks when your system administrators will remain alert.

Monitoring the calls: You will need to monitor and analyze the calls made from your SIP trunk-powered phone system. Reviewing the call patter will help you to take note and highlight any activity by outsiders.

Set credit limits – As a business owner, you can get into an agreement with your carrier (only if you are using a postpaid connection) to limit the calls after a certain budget. Thus, fraudsters will never be able to make calls after a certain limit.

Call Barring – This is another intelligent way to block unauthorized use wherein you can bar the calls being made to certain prefixes.

Restriction on international calls – If you put restriction on international calls then you can prevent the unauthorized use of the phone system.

Hacking of the phone system is nothing new because even the traditional phones have been hacked in the past. SIP trunking is just as secure as your traditional ISDN telephone system and with little alertness on your part you can easily pull the plug on SIP trunk hackers and fraudsters.

Michelle Patterson has been learning and writing about the new IP based communication technologies. She loves sharing her information so that businesses and business owners could take advantage of these technologies.