Hacking VOIP Networks

The book I read to research this post was Hacking VOIP Exposed by Mark Collier which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. VOIP stands for voice over internet protocol & is the practise of routing telephones via the internet. Especially in the last couple of years this has come a long way it used to be you used a softphone which is a phone that plugs into your computer & you used the software skype to route the phonecall which is done cheaper than by conventional means. Now there are VOIP phones that just plug into your network & the price on these is gradually coming down. As with practically everything in the computer world there are certain weaknesses that certain malicious people use. It does say in the introduction of this book that hacking VOIP is a huge subject & if it was to include everything it would be a huge book so it looks at it from a business enterprise class perspective. The most common reason people hack VOIP networks is monetary gain. This often means getting important information in the company files. An example in the book is if someone finds out a company has made more profits than expected they can buy lots of shares before it's announced & hence make lots of money. It's a good idea to use a piece of software like asterisk which hides your IP addresses & component information from snoopers. Usually when someone does this kind of hacking they use programs like Nmap & Wireshark they can analyze what packets of information are going in & out & work out what components make up your network. They will then go to a website that tells what weaknesses & issues that hardware has. It's worth mentioning that there are websites that store the IP addresses for every network on a particular continent which is very useful to hackers. Incidently if you use asterisk software your hardware needs to be compatible. Also a good way to strengthen a VOIP network is to use hardware that doesn't have many weaknesses or issues. A VOIP network is particularly susceptible to a denial of service attack as an ordinary network will often just slow down but on a VOIP network it will become impossible to communicate.