Modern telephony threats & countermeasures
Iosif I. Androulidakis, Vasileios P. Christou, Alex S. Karametis, Chris A. Papanikolaou · 2008
“It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when”. Most of us have come across that saying, regarding a computer or network incident. Many articles have been written to alert users and help administrators deal with the problems and much work has been carried out to safeguard the computing and network infrastructure. But what about our plain old telephone? Can you recall any information regarding the classical telephony threats? There are many issues concerning the threats telephony faces. We tried to address with a comical spirit, some of the basic problems that exist and threaten the telephones’ security. We taxonomized them in an easy to read essay that will prove, hopefully, useful for both administrators and simple users. Our analysis is mainly focused on Private Branch Exchanges (PBXs). A PBX is a telephone exchange serving an individual organization or company with connections to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) [9]. It is actually a private switch or router that connects a group of telephones and provides a wealth of features.