Why are Voice Fraud Threats a Danger to Your Enterprise?
Learn the threats of voice fraud and how to overcome them.
Voice frauds have seen a steady increase, especially due to remote work in the past few years. Dan Teichman, director of solutions marketing at Ribbon, talks about what voice fraud is, its types and how enterprises can protect themselves from it.
With the rise of remote work policies and increased network usage, the telecoms industry has seen a drastic rise in voice fraud attacks through VoIP communications. The 2021 CFCA Global Telecommunications Fraud Loss Survey noted that global telecom revenue loss due to fraud had increased by 28% in comparison to 2019.
Voice network vulnerabilities pose a serious threat to enterprises, targeting their reputation, confidential data, and financial well-being. According to a recent Metrigy Survey, 90% of IT leaders believe voice fraud presents a threat to their enterprise’s security. To address the following problem many companies have begun implementing different strategies. Meanwhile, hackers and other bad actors are ramping up their attacks, using increasingly sophisticated technology and strategies to avoid firewalls and other security measures.
Who Is Likely to Become a Target
Despite the many advantages conferred by SIP-based communications, the use of IP protocols increases the possibility of voice fraud attacks. Any enterprise that uses an IP PBX, IP-based unified communications and collaboration services, or has an IP-based contact center is at risk, whether the services are deployed on-premises or in the cloud. This means that there is a large ecosystem of organizations for whom voice security needs to be addressed. Additionally, with the rise of remote work, enterprises must consider how unsecured the communication is especially for employees who work remotely
See More: What Is Vishing? Definition, Methods, and Prevention Best Practices
Types of Voice Fraud and Their Effects
Businesses also need to remember that hackers may use a number of different approaches while targeting with voice fraud attacks. Therefore it’s important that companies educate themselves and understand the various categories of voice fraud. Here are just three very common threats:
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- Service theft: In these cases, hackers can compromise organizations’ communication systems to make outbound calls to premium numbers. After successfully breaking through a system’s defenses, hackers sell these numbers illegally, generating fraudulent revenue and costing enterprises significant losses. In other cases, hackers have alternative motivations; some tap phone-based or video-conferencing systems in order to gain access to confidential company information such as customer or supplier details.
- Toll-free traffic pumping: Toll-free numbers are used by U.S. enterprises and organizations for branding and marketing campaigns and to promote a regional or national presence. And because of this, they are willing to pay for calls to their toll-free numbers. Unfortunately, this also means that bad actors can generate high-volume robocalls to toll-free numbers, causing a significant cost to enterprises finding themselves forced to terminate the calls, despite these being unwanted and having no business value.
- Distributed denial of service (DDoS) and ransomware: In addition to fraud that aims to steal confidential information, another type of attack, DDoS, is often associated with blackmail to extort payment. In a DDoS attack, hackers flood an organization with traffic to purposely overflow networks and disrupt day-to-day business. As an organization’s bandwidth is overwhelmed, corporate communication activities suffer because network performance is reduced or potentially becomes unavailable. This not only affects the ability of workers to engage in typical corporate activities, but if left unchecked, it can also damage a company’s relationship with customers who no longer believe in the reliability of the network. Typically, hackers will demand a ransomware payment to stop the attacks.
Building A Robust Voice Threat Prevention Solution
Even though 45% of unwanted network traffic can be caused by nefarious activity such as scam attempts, most enterprises have not adequately prepared for, or invested in, a voice threat prevention plan. This presents a significant security risk to organizations, especially as hackers become more sophisticated every day and are not easily traced. Even organizations that believe they have robust firewall protections can fall victim to these attacks.
Smart enterprises can secure their voice network and services through a comprehensive voice threat prevention solution. Key considerations for this type of system include pattern recognition, reputation scoring, policy enforcement, and threat visibility.
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- Pattern recognition: Enterprises can utilize their network call data to detect unknown and known threats that could potentially be attacks. Basic security measures like firewall protections are not enough to secure networks. Voice threats continue to evolve, and thus enterprises require machine learning models that can establish predictive patterns of call behavior, and flag any potentially nefarious activity that warrants further investigation and identify the source. Pattern recognition can be a useful tool for enterprises looking to build a threat intelligence database.
- Reputation scoring: Reputation scoring can take machine learning models one step further by combining data from a pattern recognition function and multiple 3rd party or national sources, such as regulatory databases. With reputation scoring, enterprises can determine the level of trust they should put in each call being made and remain confident they can distinguish between legitimate calls and bad actors intending to cause harm.
- Policy enforcement: One reason enterprises have not done enough to establish stronger security measures is that securing a VoIP network requires more than just next-generation firewalls – it requires a session border controller (SBC). By automating the relationship between reputation scoring and an SBC, the enterprise can strengthen its network’s security with real-time policy enforcement.
- Threat visibility: Finally, enterprises need to be sure their security solution is providing a strong defense against voice attacks. A reporting dashboard that shows analytics of the voice threat landscape and the success level of voice threat mitigation is a critical tool in the organization’s voice security arsenal.
Voice Attack Prevention Can’t Wait
By implementing a robust voice threat prevention solution, enterprises can take concrete steps to save their businesses billions in revenue, secure confidential data, and continue retaining customer trust. Security breaches will only become more common as hackers continue to grow more sophisticated, and organizations cannot afford to find themselves victims of more fraud.
Are you also fighting the battle of voice fraud? Do share with us how you are battling voice fraud on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to know!
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