Despite its critical role in daily operations, phone system resilience is often overlooked, leaving many businesses to underestimate the impact of an outage or cyber-attack. Telephony is a piece of IT infrastructure like any other in your business so it’s crucial to understand the risks and implement strategies to minimise them.
Why are phone systems vulnerable?
Your phone system is most vulnerable to threats when calls are made outside the confines of your internal infrastructure.
If your employees connect to your business on devices while they’re working away from the office, they’re no longer operating via the internal infrastructure. This poses cyber-risk.
Unfortunately, there are far too many phone systems still playing catch up with limited built in security to accommodate the flexibility of connecting from anywhere and minimise the vulnerabilities.
Common threats to your phone system
Your phone system, regardless of it being a traditional landline or a modern IP network, is susceptible to a range of security threats that can harm your business if infiltrated. It’s important to understand the threats you could face so you can act on them quickly.
Caller ID Spoofing alters the caller ID to misrepresent the source of a call. This is designed to trick you into thinking the call is from a trusted source and could lead to phishing threats.
Call Tampering deliberately manipulates live call data. Attackers interfere with or alter the call transmissions resulting in reduced call quality or misinformation.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) overwhelms your phone system with a flood of fake call traffic. This can lead to disconnected calls, reduced call quality and service outages.
Malware and software vulnerabilities are an opportunity for attackers to exploit weaknesses in the technology that hosts your phone system and gain access to your network.
Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) could also be described as eavesdropping. The attacker intercepts the call, pretends to be one of the callers, taking control of the conversation and manipulating it to steal information.
Spam Over IP Telephony (SPIT) sends out bulk pre-recorded voicemails and/or robocalls made using VoIP, aimed to cause disruption, similar to email spam.
Vishing uses persuasive language, and usually caller ID spoofing, to trick you into sharing sensitive information.
Voice Over Misconfigured Internet Telephones (VOMIT) exploits system weaknesses to eavesdrop on conversations and extract sensitive call data.
You can minimise your risk
Being proactive is crucial. Implementing strategies to build resilience will help keep you a step ahead of attackers and strengthen the protection for your phone system.
Some of the ways you can take action are:
- Make sure user passwords are strong and unique
- Limit access to admin controls by implementing role-based access control (RBAC)
- Implement multi-factor authentication for access to your phone system
- Implement robust firewalls to reduce the risk of unauthorised access
- Install anti-virus software and ensure its patched whenever an update is released
- Adopt monitoring tools that track communication traffic, performance, events and keep an eye out for unusual activity
- Regularly update your phone system infrastructure and software. Outdated systems can block legitimate incoming traffic
- Administer regular security awareness training so your team can recognise, avoid and report suspicious activity
- Enable encryption for voice traffic to prevent eavesdropping
- Get your phone system assessed for its cyber-resilience
Book your phone system in for a health check
Irrespective of age or type, we offer our customers a health check on their phone system to identify any vulnerabilities or potential threats. It’s free, only takes 10 minutes over the phone and we provide a report that calls out the strengths, weaknesses and what can be done to improve cyber-resilience.
If you’d like a health check on your phone system, reach out to our team today.