ID Fraud Comes To VoIP

Passwords and usernames from Voice over Internet Protocol accounts are now selling for more than stolen credit cards numbers, a VoIP equipment maker says.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), or Internet telephony, is certainly growing rapidly, as more and more people use their broadband connections to make phone calls. But in the wake of that has come an entirely new form if identity fraud, according to VoIP equipment maker Newport Networks.

People are hacking into VoIP accounts and stealing usernames and passwords, which are now selling online for more than stolen credit card numbers. While credit card numbers go for around $12, stolen VoIP accounts sell for around $17.

The victims are usually domestic users, rather than business that have very secure networks. The problem is that most carriers simply don’t have secure VoIP networks, and it would take around $5 per subscriber to provide an adequate level of security. That said, Skype, the best known VoIP provider, claims to offer complete encryption.

Dave Gladwin, the vice president of products at Newport Networks, told the BBC that VoIP is “still at an embryonic stage but as voice adoption increases it becomes more of a problem and needs addressing. The details are not sent as plain text but are encoded in such a way as to be "easily captured and unobscured."