Enforcing security best practices is crucial for keeping your VoIP phone system safe from hackers. Ensure strong passwords are enforced, and team members don’t leave their phones in unattended rooms. Also, encourage team members to accept OS updates for their mobile devices to guard against malware. Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started: Be sure your VoIP provider encrypts data end-to-end, prevents packet sniffing, and reviews call logs consistently for suspicious activity.
Encryption
Encryption is one of your best tools when securing your VoIP phone system. Seek a provider that uses TLS and SRTP to encrypt voice packets for privacy, integrity, message authentication, and replay protection.
Encryption can also help prevent service theft, a common cyberattack in that hackers gain access to your VoIP phone system and use it for their purposes – often to make expensive international calls. This can leave your business with an extortionate bill to pay, and it’s easy for such attacks to be prevented by using geo-fencing.
Educate your team on security best practices and train them to notice and report suspicious activity. Implementing remote device management can also be helpful to keep your business secure, especially if employees are working from home or on the go.
Firewalls
Firewalls are one of the most important tools to protect your VoIP network. They are designed to keep out nefarious actors that can compromise your business.
These attacks include VoIP phishing, which can impersonate your customer support or NOC staff, leading to a security breach. They also include denial of service (DoS) attacks, which starve the system of resources and can degrade call quality, uptime, and latency. They can also include war dialing, which allows attackers to scan other networks, and international calling fraud, where hackers make expensive overseas calls that rack up toll charges for your business.
To protect against these threats, you can utilize a firewall and other security features like password best practices. These practices are easy to implement and greatly improve your business’s security.
User Permissions
When selecting a VoIP provider, looking for one that offers encryption is essential. Without it, your data is vulnerable to hackers, which can steal or alter your data and information.
Passwords are another critical aspect of securing your system. Best practices include using passwords of at least ten characters that combine letters, numbers, and non-alphanumerics. It would help if you also encouraged users to apply operating system updates regularly, which can help guard against exploitation.
Finally, it would help if you educated your employees on security best practices so they can recognize suspicious activity on the network. For example, if they notice calls coming in from odd locations or at unusual times of the day, that’s usually a bad sign and may indicate a security breach. You can also work with your provider to implement intrusion prevention systems, which can monitor activity and identify threats.
Intrusion Prevention Systems
While VoIP systems provide a range of benefits, including lower costs and technological advances that landlines don’t offer, they also come with cybersecurity risks. These phone systems are connected to the internet, leaving them vulnerable to hackers who can steal data and call information from your network.
Unencrypted networks are prone to snooping, and data thieves can easily record your calls without being detected. To avoid this, you must ensure that every piece of data sent and received by your VoIP system is encrypted. This is especially important if HIPAA regulates your business and must adhere to strict privacy rules.
Two-Factor Authentication
Ensure your VoIP system is protected with a firewall and network address translation (NAT). This is crucial to keep hackers away from your data, signaling, and voice packets.
Another great tip is to use two-factor authentication on your VoIP devices. With this, you require your employees to log in using a unique passcode sent to their phones. This prevents unauthorized access even if the password gets stolen.
Educate your employees about best practices and encourage them to report suspicious activity that they notice. A little education can go a long way in keeping your VoIP secure from nefarious actors. Moreover, a good VoIP provider will have a status page with updates on incidents affecting your system. It’s important to check it regularly for security updates and alerts.