ComputerWorld in Australia came out with an article today headlined “Enterprises must avoid IP telephony for teleworkers or face attack“. Given that I use a secure teleworker phone on a daily basis, I was immediately struck by the headline and felt compelled to write a response over on Voice of VOIPSA: “Why Computerworld.au is dead wrong about… “. I think you can gather my opinion from the title. It will be interesting to see if there is any response from ComputerWorld (I’ve emailed them the link).
The sad thing is that outside of the headline, the rest of the article was more or less okay. Just a bad headline…
I also had a bit of a rant on my blog about the article. My main complaint is that the title fuels the VoIP security hype. I also think the content of the article contributes to what seems to be illogical paranoia about VoIP risks. Even in a weak security environment, getting access to someone’s bank account via a VoIP vulnerability is not trivial and the probability of it occurring is low.
Is there a reason to be concerned about VoIP security? Of course, but that is true with every aspect of an organization’s security: from the administrative and logical aspects to the physical. A little bit of common sense goes a long way!
Rick McCharles