Even subjects such as Signaling System #7 (SS7) can be learned
through thousands of open sources today.
Gaining access to ones network only requires an operator??™s license, which today is
easy to obtain. In some countries, all that is required is a commercial bank account,
which can be obtained with nothing more than a driver??™s license. There are many rogue
operators dumping traffic on legitimate carriers all over the world; they are highly
trained, well funded, and well educated.
The Internet changed the paradigm of communications for everyone, not just in the
sense of mail and instant messaging, but now voice communications. Once it became
possible to route voice communications over the public Internet, these very same rogue
operators found a path to routing calls all over the world for few to no termination fees
on their part. Networks continue to be compromised on a global basis, thanks to VoIP.
One of the pitfalls of VoIP is a lack of security. The standards really do not address
security implementations and do not provide mechanisms as part of the registration
process, leaving this up to the operators??™ own implementation. Unfortunately many
operators never implement any fashion of security, treating the VoIP nodes in the same
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fashion as their legacy voice switches (which have no security at all from a subscriber
perspective).
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