Securing Your Voice Network: Why SBCs are Essential for VoIP Security

If your organization relies on unified communications (UC) or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for voice communications, you may feel confident that a traditional data firewall is sufficient to protect your network. While data firewalls are crucial, VoIP communications bring unique challenges and vulnerabilities that require more robust security measures. As VoIP continues to grow in popularity due to its flexibility, cost savings and easy scalability, it also faces increasing cyber threats.

As a recent Forbes Advisor article highlighted, cybercrime surged in 2023, with over 343 million victims, marking a 72 percent increase in data breaches between 2021 and 2023.¹

These statistics are alarming, especially for organizations that may not realize how exposed their VoIP systems can be to cyber threats.

VoIP Security Threats: A Growing Concern

While VoIP has numerous benefits, it also comes with specific security risks that can compromise the privacy, reliability and integrity of voice communications. These include Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, call flooding, eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks.

However, the majority of security incidents in VoIP networks are related to SIP-based cyberattacks, which target the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the most popular signaling protocol for VoIP. These attacks take advantage of vulnerabilities in the SIP protocol or the SIP devices, such as weak authentication, weak encryption, wrong configuration or software bugs, causing security problems such as service disruption, call hijacking, fraud or data leakage.

Is a NAT Firewall Enough for Your Voice Network?

A NAT firewall allows multiple devices on a private network to share a single public IP address, hiding internal devices from the outside world and saving IP addresses. However, it can interfere with UC platforms communicating with SIP trunks and pose VoIP security risks.

While a NAT firewall's interaction with a UC platform varies depending on the setup, it can pose some security risks for the VoIP network. For example, when a UC port is shared via DMZ IP or port forwarding, the NAT firewall is ineffective, exposing the UC platform to attacks. Attackers can use very simple tools to perform DoS attacks or hijack voice calls by manipulating IP addresses.

Beyond the Firewall: Why Session Border Controllers Are Critical

Clearly, simply relying on a firewall for your VoIP network security isn’t enough. A firewall may protect your data but cannot fully defend against sophisticated threats targeting voice communications.

This is where AudioCodes Mediant family of session border controllers (SBCs), ranked by research firm Omdia as the market leader for three years running, comes into play. Acting as a security gate between your VoIP network and the public internet, AudioCodes SBCs ensure that your voice communications are both reliable and secure. They provide critical security features, including:

• DoS/DDoS Protection: Detects and mitigates attacks by filtering malicious traffic and using advanced load balancing, failover and redundancy features.
• Call Admission Control (CAC): Controls the number and quality of calls entering or leaving the network, ensuring optimal voice quality while preventing network congestion.
• Encryption: Encrypts both signaling and media streams to prevent eavesdropping and data leaks.
• Access Control Lists (ACLs): Limits network access based on predefined rules, reducing the risk of unauthorized users gaining entry.
• VoIP Firewall Capabilities: Includes deep packet inspection and protocol validation, safeguarding your network from a range of attacks like call flooding, spoofed messages and registration hijacking.

Application Note
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Why Your Organization Needs AudioCodes SBCs

With cyber threats evolving rapidly, securing your VoIP network is more important than ever. VoIP attacks can have far-reaching consequences, from service disruptions and financial losses to damaged reputations. By integrating AudioCodes SBCs into your VoIP infrastructure, you can proactively address these risks.

Available for both on-premises and cloud deployments, AudioCodes Mediant SBCs provide comprehensive voice security for organizations of all sizes. Whether you're concerned about SIP-based cyberattacks, call flooding or eavesdropping, AudioCodes SBCs offer the protection you need to successfully face down the growing array of VoIP security threats.

1 https://www.forbes.com/advisor/education/it-and-tech/cybersecurity-statistics/, Forbes