As a brief followup to my previous post about VoIP security, I came across a couple articles that offer an interesting point\u00a0\/ counterpoint to the questions regarding VoIP reliance and peace of mind.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The first article from PC World by Lincoln Spector; Is VoIP Secure?<\/a>:<\/p>\n The digital data of a VOIP call can be intercepted anywhere along the complicated path from your router through the multiple servers until it goes out to the analog phone network. Assuming your VOIP service doesn’t encrypt calls, whoever intercepts it can listen to it, as well.<\/p>\n Which raises the question: Does your VOIP service encrypt calls?<\/p>\n Skype does, with very strong, 256-bit AES encryption. You can read the details here.<\/p>\n But others are not as cautious. I know that Google Voice doesn’t encrypt their calls because a Google spokesperson told me so. Yahoo didn’t respond to my query, so I think it best to assume the Yahoo Voice (the service that USANomad uses) also lets their calls go out unprotected.<\/p>\n While encryption increases your safety, it doesn’t guarantee it.\u00a0 Your own computer may be the weak point in your VOIP security chain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The next article is from Network World<\/a> by\u00a0Jim Metzler and Steve Taylor; Is VoIP Too Secure?<\/a>:<\/p>\n The issue that was discussed by FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni is that with VoIP solutions – and Web-based VoIP in particular – the individual conversations can be quite difficult to intercept and decode. Further, while at one time Internet-based voice conversations were largely limited to “major” applications like Skype, there is rapid and widespread proliferation of “voice chat” capabilities. For instance, you can do a voice chat, a video chat, or even call an external phone from Gmail. And this only covers voice-like capabilities, and doesn’t include other messaging.<\/p>\n Interestingly, and in a move that makes sense, the government is not specifying exactly which services need to be modified so that they can be more easily monitored.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, which is it?\u00a0\u00a0Will infected computers\u00a0and unreliable encryption severely compromise your safety or, is the proliferation of\u00a0IP based communications\u00a0the saving grace of interception resistance?<\/p>\n Maybe it’s a little bit of both?\u00a0 Security\u00a0will always be an\u00a0issue so do everything in your power\u00a0keep your systems updated and\u00a0secure on your end but, take some comfort\u00a0in the fact that the government is having troubles decoding conversations.\u00a0 Some of this similar to\u00a0what was represented in the NOVA episode The Spy Factory <\/a>where a major challenge for the NSA\u00a0was not collecting information but acquiring the resources to\u00a0deal with the sheer volume of data, making sense of it, and then connecting the dots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a brief followup to my previous post about VoIP security, I came across a couple articles that offer an interesting point\u00a0\/ counterpoint to the questions regarding VoIP reliance and peace of mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1053],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-voip-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27312"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181103,"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27312\/revisions\/181103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.voipsupply.com\/blog\/voip-insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}