Almost half of organizations suffer voice network attacks

A new survey shows that 47 percent of organizations have experienced a vishing (voice phishing) or social engineering attack via their voice networks in the past year.

The study by voice traffic protection specialist Mutare also finds most are unaware of the volume of unwanted phone calls traversing their network, or the significance of threats lurking in unwanted traffic, which includes robocalls, spoof calls, scam calls, spam calls, spam storms, vishing, smishing and social engineering.

Across all industries 9 percent of all calls received by businesses are unwanted. Moreover, 45 percent of all unwanted traffic is tied to nefarious activity, while 55 percent is tied to nuisance activity.

Despite this 38 percent say their organizations don't collect any data on the amount of inbound, unwanted, and potentially malicious voice traffic hitting their organizations. Of those that do collect such data, 23 percent of respondents estimate that between five and 10 percent of inbound calls are unwanted, followed by 15 percent of respondents who estimated that over 10 percent are unwanted, and 10 percent who estimate that over 20 percent of calls are unwanted.

When it comes to dealing with the problem 36 percent of respondents cite security awareness training as the top solution to protect voice networks. That's followed by traffic firewalls (34 percent), spam blockers (26 percent), training for vishing attacks (20 percent), training for social engineering (23 percent), and threat detection (13 percent).

The report's author's conclude, "Most importantly, when the business telephone is involved, the issue is a human one. Every organization has to answer the phone. So, your people are going to be faced with protecting the organization against the bad actors."

The full report is available from the Mutare site.

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