VoIP the next target for spammers

Hackers have attacked Columbia University, the university where the co-author of the VoIP protocol resides. The hackers left marketing "spit "(spam over internet telephony) on multiple phone extensions at the University.

According to the Guardian newspaper, there already are examples of voice phishing--vishing--in the U.S. where the penetration of VoIP is getting up to 15 percent. "The real problem with VoIP is that it's very easy to take a name as your identity which appears with a call, or to put up a number on a screen that isn't actually the number that the call's being made from," David Endler, director of security research at TippingPoint told the Guardian.

"This lends itself perfectly to vishing, which we've already started to see, and I'm genuinely surprised we haven't seen more. People generally trust the phone, so if they get a voicemail from their bank saying they need to call in, they will, and they're used to telling an agent some security details or tapping in a pass code on the phone to prove who they are. As soon as they've done that they've given a hacker their identity," said Endler.
Sipera, a Texas security firm recently claimed two of the large VoIP providers, Vonage and the London based Globe 7, had significant security holes which made them vulnerable to attacks.

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