When telecommunications service providers consider security threats today, they must think about more than just toll fraud. Focusing only on the money lost to fraudulent calls is short sighted and the UC industry needs to broaden the scope of its concerns. If service providers are like most businesses today, nearly 80% of them lack confidence in their cybersecurity and therefore they need to up their game because the consequences of not taking threats seriously could be devastating or, perhaps, even fatal to a service provider’s business.
“There are so many fronts to the topic of security,” explains Kevin Selkowitz, the Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at NetSapiens. “Traditionally, when we talked about it, we just discussed toll fraud, because that’s what really nailed the service providers. It’s what costs them money. It’s dollars out of the pocket. But now we’re seeing ransomware, bitcoin mining, and other novel threats.”
He adds that any discussion about security has to require a diversity of approaches and motivations. “Matters like data privacy are hard to quantify,” he says. “They may not hit you in the same way as a fraud bill, but you still need to think about them.”
No magic bullet
Cybersecurity is vitally important, but there is no magic bullet and organisations must not try to cut corners or have a narrow focus when it comes to rolling out the appropriate protective measures. “We all need to have a holistic approach to security,” he emphasises.
Early in his career, Selkowitz admits to being a bit cavalier about cybersecurity and learned the importance of adequate protection after being hacked a couple of times. “Fortunately, they were minor, but once you get breached, you get the ‘religion’ of security real fast. I learned then that only the paranoid survive.”
“Security and privacy are not an afterthought when it comes to building our products,” says Selkowitz, who believes the best approach to developing and maintaining products with strong protection is to assume the identity of a hacker and think like a hacker.
“We have a holistic approach to security with a lot of facets. An advanced UCaaS platform like SNAPsolution is not just a phone system, it’s a toolkit that’s open-ended, flexible, and dynamic but that also means there’s a lot of attack vectors to protect”
Security and privacy should not be an afterthought when it comes to a company’s unified communications, collaboration, and video solutions. Selkowitz reiterates the need for looking at security holistically. “It’s all about hygiene. It’s access control. It’s security updates. It’s monitoring. You may have intrusion detection systems and other security, but if you’re monitoring and you see your CPU loads spike, you should be looking into that.”
Holistic security
NetSapiens’ commitment to security is one of the reasons its SNAPsolution is the fastest growing platform in North America according to market research from Frost & Sullivan, May 2021. “Our customers appreciate the holistic approach and many are willing to go on the record to praise the company,” says Jason Byrne, the Senior Vice President of Solution Strategy, Business Development & Marketing at NetSapens.
In a recent video testimonial, Brightlink CTO Joe White said, “One of the most interesting things for NetSapiens partners is being able to prevent call fraud. Toll fraud is a huge problem in the industry and it costs companies millions of dollars every single year.”
Fraud and privacy protection go hand-in-hand and NetSapiens is reinforcing the need to take a holistic approach to all aspects of security. “Carriers worry about fraud while end users – their customers – worry about privacy,” says Selkowitz. “NetSapiens worries about both fraud and privacy, as well as the other security risks when we build our products. Security is always at the top of our mind.”
