How private are your VoIP calls

Connecting with VoIP (Voice over IP) has become an essential tool for business and personal life. Skype recorded 560 million registered users at the end of 2009, and at peak times, 23 million users are logged in (recorded in March 2010). Is the convenience of VoIP overshadowing its security threats? If it’s effortless to connect to people from anywhere in the world, surely it’s just as effortless for someone else to eavesdrop on your calls?

One of the biggest vulnerabilities of VoIP is the simplicity for others to eavesdrop into private conversations – it’s not particularly difficult and there is a multitude of ways to do it. VoIP calls travel across the public Internet, leaving hackers to capture VoIP packets, which generally requires a packet analyzer. All the hacker needs is a laptop, readily available software and the knowledge of how to hack into your network. With this in hand, the hacker can obtain user IDs, passwords and even gain knowledge of confidential business information.

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