With access to the internet as easy as ever, VoIP is becoming a popular technology for the purpose of telecommunication.  It is a relatively new technology and is facing a lot of challenges in competing with traditional telecommunication using TDM technology.

The biggest challenge VoIP faces is voice quality, and since its birth, engineers and developers have been primarily focused on fixing voice quality issues.  With the phenomenal growth and use of the Internet, those who are always in the search of finding ways to harm people one way or another also found a great medium to reach billions of people instantly with very less effort. VoIP came as a great tool to do harm to the general public and businesses, which was previously not possible. Not only that VoIP made it possible, but also unbelievably easy. Unfortunately there is not enough awareness on VoIP related security threats and how to avoid them.

The seminar on VoIP Security 101 focused on various security threats to VoIP users and summarized how hackers and attackers use VoIP technology as a tool to rip people off of their money, or harm them in other ways. It also looked at various ways to avoid them.

The main threats which were looked at included:

1. Vishing
2. Denial of Service (DoS)
3. Eavesdropping
4. Call hijacking
5. Injected messages
6. VoIP Scam or SPIT
7. Caller ID spoofing
8. Toll Fraud
9. Flooding and logic attacks

In the end, it was concluded that encryption of VoIP traffic, specially that of VoIP signalling between the VoIP hardware is very important. VoIP aware hardware is also critical is some cases. Common sense also plays an important role on how to keep yourself protected of these threats, e.g. if someone calls you from apparently a legitimate phone number of your financial institution and asks for your pin number and security code, you should know that no financial institution in reality calls you and asks for your security information.