More Spam! Get Ready for Spam on Your Net Phone

It was hardly the big conversation topic at the VON conference in San Jose last week, where companies big and small were pitching their Voice over Internet Protocol technology and products. But when conversations at the show turned to security issues, the SPIT started flying. Not literally, of course.

Jeffrey Citron, chairman and chief executive of Vonage, took questions after his keynote speech and was asked how he plans to address security issues with VoIP. Clearly, he wasn't going to share his security strategy so early.

"The great thing about security is that you don't have to tell everyone what you're doing," he responded. "But we understand that SPIT is an issue."

The issue is not only the potential for more telemarketing calls but also voicemail spam -- the thousands of unsolicited voice messages that a spammer could send to VoIP voicemail boxes with a simple click. So far, it's not a major problem. But as VoIP grows over the next few years, you can expect that 'spitters' will be ready.

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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: For those folks not yet familiar with the term 'SPIT', it is spam pushed over internet telephones, and it helps if you understand something about internet telephones and how they work. If I understand correctly, computers which act as switches for internet telephony have 'mailboxes' just like the email box you use for incoming/outgoing email. A piece of voicemail (or 'email') gets put in your slot, something triggers it to ring your net phone and the 'email' gets delivered to you, much like when you are using a Unix computer as I have here, new incoming 'email' triggers a message on my screen saying 'you have new mail'. Just as I can deliver this Digest en-masse to many readers using an 'exploder' style address, I presume spammers can use an 'exploder' address to send a single peice of 'email' to hundreds or thousands of users. And your voicemail box holds those pieces of 'email' which cannot get delivered right now because you are busy on some other 'email'. I am surprised the spammers (or Spitters) are not busy using them already to deliver their trash. PAT]