This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Local Voices

Monmouth Telecom "Where Telephony Evolves"

Helpful Tips to Protect your Phone Service from Organized Crime and Cyber Villains

 

 

Find out what's happening in Red Bank-Shrewsburywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Monmouth Telecom has 18 years of experience providing telephone and internet service; with that experience comes valuable expertise allowing Monmouth Telecom the ability to protect their customers from hackers and cyber villains.

 

Find out what's happening in Red Bank-Shrewsburywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The US Attorney’s Office - District of New Jersey, issued a Press Release involving a scheme involving the owner of a telecommunications company admitting his role in international hacking:

 

The scheme involved the theft of long distance telephone service, either through the theft of cell phone service or through a process known as “PBX hacking.” Hackers targeted PBX (Private Branch Exchange) telephone systems of corporations and placed calls to those systems in an attempt to identify telephone extensions that are not in use. Once an unused extension was identified, hackers illegally reprogrammed the telephone system. The hacked telephone system could then be used by the hackers and others to make long distance telephone calls that are charged back to the victim corporation, creating virtually free telephone lines through which they could make calls.

 

The following tips can save you and your company millions of international minutes and dollars:

 

1. Gratuitously Block Expensive Destinations: If you are a Monmouth Telecom customer, you may have dialed an international telephone number and heard the message: “This number is currently blocked. Please call your service provider.”

You can eliminate a great deal of risk by simply blocking calls to all international locations. If you make calls to a particular country, then block all international calls except for that country. This will result in the occasional need to call your service provider to unblock a country that you need to call, but isn’t this small inconvenience worth the provided safety?

 

2. Monitoring Traffic for Anything Out of the Ordinary: Keeping an eye on traffic is critical. Monmouth Telecom develops traffic benchmarks for all of our customers during normal circumstances and sets off alarms when traffic appears out of the ordinary.

 

3. Shoot First Ask Questions Later: Better safe than sorry. These fraudsters can rack up a lot of money very quickly. If fraud is suspected shut the traffic down and block calls until you can verify exactly what is going on.

 

4. Utilize the Latest Cryptographic Features: A lot of hardware and software vendors provide great security features, but they are not  enabled by default. You need to research the available security measures and enable them.

 

5. IP Whitelisting: Phone hacking is not limited to legacy style phone systems. With Business VoIP Phone Service on  the rise hackers have a whole new field of attacks to perpetrate. You can eliminate a lot of potential hackers by limiting incoming connections to a known safe list of IP addresses. However, this comes at the cost of requiring static IP addresses at all connecting locations. If you do not have static IP addresses, at the very least you can blacklist large IP blocks outside of the U.S.

 

6. Use a Cloud Based Phone Service Provider: There is a fundamental problem with a PBX, the business owner is responsible and financially accountable for a complex telephone system that they, did not configure, have no expertise in maintaining and have no interest in acquiring expertise to maintain.

This is a recipe for disaster and cyber villains have been taking advantage of it for years. With Monmouth Telecom as your provider we are in a strong position to secure your system. With the world moving to cloud based services like Hosted PBX  we, as your provider are more so than ever security minded.
We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?