Thwarting hacking attacks takes constant effort

Tuesday, 19 November 2013, 9:26 am
Press Release: Conversant

Thwarting hacking attacks takes constant effort, so leave it to the professionals

By Brett Thorburn, Conversant

Reports this month that schools in Auckland and Christchurch and a government department were defrauded after their PABX phone systems were hacked are of great concern.

Once the phone systems were hacked, they were used to run up thousands of dollars in calls to premium numbers or expensive destinations.

According the article, in response to three of its business customers being hit by phone hacking during a single weekend in October, Orcon started to automatically block calls from its customers to 28 countries.

However, Conversant has been restricting access to various expensive international destinations for a number of years now. Our systems require a PIN number before calls to these destinations can be made.

And this is just one of a number of defences we currently have in place to reduce the impact of phone hacking.

With real money to be made from a successful phone system hack, we’re very conscious of the potential risks from such threats and are constantly working on thwarting attacks.

In addition, we also take the following steps:

• We actively monitor all our systems and ban any IP addresses that we detect suspicious activity from

• We automatically detect hacking attempts and block the IP addresses they originate from. We currently have a list of over 450 IP addresses that are on our blacklist (i.e. they have attempted to hack us directly) and are working on improving this all the time. The most common source of VoIP-specific attacks has been Gaza over the last few months.

• We keep our systems up to date with security patches.

These latest hacking incidents and the effort that goes into preventing them highlight the fact that setting up your own hosted system to offer VoIP services is not that easy and certainly not for the faint-hearted.

A lot of work and considerable experience go into in securing and maintaining PABX systems.

Therefore, we strongly recommend that instead of developing their own hosted PABX offering, telco or IT service providers should consider partnering with an established supplier, such as Conversant.

Brett Thorburn is director at Conversant, a leader in virtual phone systems purpose-built in-house that enable SMEs to enjoy the benefits of a PABX without having to buy the hardware.

ENDS

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