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How Threats to Your Network Are Still Getting Through

Written by Brian Gregory | Nov 16, 2021 1:39:02 PM

It’s obvious to all IT professionals that if you don’t take proactive measures to prevent network threats, you’ll see the results of an unguarded network rather quickly. Without the proper protection, your business could experience a major loss in data, resources, and financial stability - as in tens of billions of dollars per year. Despite various layers of protection for your firewall and your network foundation, your voice may not be getting the attention it deserves. This can be an easy backdoor entry for bad actors that can enter your network and begin to mimic your larger data. However, there are solutions that are easy to implement and attainable for even the smallest or newest networks, to create a layer of protection that will keep threats at bay.

Why Are Voice Network Threats A Bigger Deal Now More Than Ever?

Bad actors are looking for any path to get inside your network. As they exhaust options on the “traditional" paths for infiltration, the voice network becomes an attractive path to get inside. Where this was historically done to commit toll fraud (still a problem BTW), it’s more prevalent today to use voice networks as an entry path to get to other systems. While data theft is prevalent, blackmail has emerged as the primary mechanism for hackers extracting money from the corporate target.

Why Is It So Hard To Know If I Have A Voice Network Threat?

Network threats can take many different forms. They can look like a hacked IP-PBX system, subscription fraud, or even the redirection of your entire user database. Their strength ranges from weakening your resources to stealing your sensitive business data.

 Even the most mature networks are vulnerable without the proper protection. Malware can learn patterns and track weak spots in your various networks - regardless of strength or speed. Their ability to manipulate or mimic your data makes it difficult to track down the attacks without the right analytics tools.

This is why you need a layer of protection that utilizes behavioral analysis and gives you the ability to turn data into actionable insights.

How to Stay One Step Ahead with FraudProtect

Like enterprise networks, malware attacks have become smarter and stronger. When networks equipped themselves with the latest technology, network threats became all the wiser.

 This is why your solution will need to adapt and train itself to your data’s unique calling patterns and tailor itself to the traffic it’s protecting. This will require specific intelligence to spot the data that doesn’t belong.

 A solution that leverages the intelligence to register a normal “baseline” of data activity can spot the data that is only a mirror. A solution that uses KPI data to identify network trends and anomalies over time will provide end-to-end view network-wide troubleshooting and empower your network to become smarter and stronger every time.

 When a fraudulent threat enters your voice network, behavioral models can track call attempts, call duration, and call types coming in. Behavioral models can also track trunk group activity to flag high-rate numbers and avoid large toll bills. Target numbers that step outside of normal behaviors trigger a threat incident to be investigated and are marked at the top of the offending called numbers.

 FraudProtect has the muscle memory intelligence to track the threat that is only mimicking the true data. Within Ribbon’s security application suite, the network operations application kit performs retrospective root cause analysis with historical data. This creates a record of fraudulent attempts to prevent the same mistakes from happening twice and helping your solution become smarter with each attack. 

Ribbon’s FraudProtect platform is built for scalability, reliability, and performance and allows you to fully comply with privacy policies. Learn more about the additional layers of security within our data analytics suite in our FraudProtect brochure.