VoIP Voice Spam (SPIT)
It’s not uncommon to fire up your e-mail program and find your inbox
littered with spam. We’ve become so accustomed to the rituals of deleting
them.
But what if you logged onto your voicemail and it announced that you had
30 new messages--and that 25 of them were unsolicited commercial
broadcasting calls? Or you were out to dinner with your children, your
phone rings, and it’s a Pornographic Voice Spam message.
‘Spam over Internet Telephony’ has already coined it’s own acronym;
SPIT, and SPIT is much more deadly than its email cousin. Email spam
will degrade service and clog up bandwidth. If your real emails are delayed
by a few minutes, it is not a big deal. With VoIP spam, the gateways are hit
directly which degrades voice quality, something which is very noticeable
to end users.
Some industry observers are cautioning that the open nature of a VoIP
phone call makes it easy for spammers to send audio-commercials to
people’s VoIP voice-mail inboxes in much the same way they carpet bomb
e-mail inboxes today. Here’s why.
VoIP is completely insecure at the protocol level; there is no encryption
and authentication. I can call you, and there's no way for you to verify who
I am. I can even send a caller ID from the U.S. President, or the CIA, and
you won't know who I am. And people can easily hack a caller ID and claim
to be whomever they want.
And since VoIP services aren't regulated, customers aren't entitled to the
same rights and protections as standard phone users, consumer groups
warn.
Any open, IP-based phone system could be a target of “spitters.” That
includes such services as Free World Dialup, SIPPhone, and Earthlink’s
Free Online Calling program.
Other services, such as Skype and Vonage would be more immune to
such attacks because portions of those networks operate over a closed
system that the SPITters would have to hack. However any network
architecture is vulnerable to hacker attack, in fact Skype users were
subjected to an unsolicited Voice Broadcast Message earlier in 2004

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