Call Accounting……an essential business tool for improving productivity, aiding in risk mitigation and combating physical or cyber threats. 

Many organizations utilize Call Accounting Services to assist in improving staff productivity, identify abuse, and detect fraud. Besides providing visibility into employee phone usage and recovery of telephony costs, organizations are now adding Call Accounting as an effective tool in their arsenal to help combat both physical and cyber threats. 

If you are familiar with Call Accounting, you already know the benefits it provides as a telecom expense tool. Did you know that as physical and cyber-attacks increase, organizations are turning to this “tried and true” solution as an effective tool to aide in thwarting these continuous probes and seemingly, never ending attacks? Here are some trends to keep in mind and what you can do to avoid being a target: 

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) 

 Advanced Call Accounting Solutions already have intelligence built in to identify and alert administrators of unusual or frequent patterns in phone calls and data traffic on the network. As threats continue to grow and hackers continue to learn how to get around conventional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), many administrators are enlisting their Call Account Solutions to help in the fight against this threat. One reason is that these solutions run quietly in the background and have been proven effective for greater than 20 years. 

Currently, with phone calls being nothing more than a packet of data traversing the network, hackers see this as an opportunity to further exploit the potential vulnerabilities embedded within unsecured data traffic. 

“Listening In” 

 A growing trend in the Black Hat community is to “listen in” on unsecured VoIP Calls traversing the internet. The hacker’s goals are to potentially reroute calls to unethical organizations working to collect credit card or other personal data, or garner corporate intelligence or security credentials in an effort to further gain access to enterprise systems. An added “benefit” of hacking VoIP calls to a criminal is to develop a network map of the corporate environment and possibly launch a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on the victims VoIP Network by overloading it with inauthentic packs. 

Call Accounting Solution 

 How can an effective Call Accounting Solution help proactively catch these bad practices before they become a problem? Remember the days when daemon and war dialers were all the rage and hitting phone systems on a regular basis? Call Accounting Systems were used then and still are today to help proactively notify administrators of these attacks and avoid overloading the network, mitigating unwarranted vendor charges and protecting client infrastructure. 

The process for proactively monitoring the network for VoIP attacks works exactly the same. The Call Accounting Solution “listens” to the VoIP patterns and can alert an administrator of potential threats before they become a true threat. 

If you like this BLOG and want to learn more, give us a call and we’d be happy to talk about how our Upland Call Accounting Solutions can help you and your organization. 

And if you are ready to learn more about looking for a vendor that can offer the benefits of Call Accounting, be sure to read our White Paper “Selecting and ITFM Vendor,” part of our ITFM Education Series.