By Brian Handrigan on Friday, 14 September 2018
Category: Network Management

Best practices to protect your VoIP network

 Many business executives share important information on VoIP and therefore you want to keep your VoIP network safe. Enterprise VoIP customers and service providers are vulnerable to many inherent security risks compared to the traditional telephone and cellular services. These security issues are the biggest threats.


Whether it is providing customer service or engaging in a sales call, your business depends upon being able to deliver the high-expectations your customers have for voice service. Dropped calls, dropped packets, one-way audio and latency can severely affect your customer experience and have a long-term effect on your brand reputation.

Enterprise customers also have to deal with issues related to service disruption, subscriber impersonation and toll fraud. Resolving disputes and restoring service to employees who are victims of such attacks sap resources and adversely affect productivity. Network visibility can help enterprises to sift through the traffic and detect these threats. Deep visibility into content in real time can help enterprises to prevent such intrusions.

EXA40(D) & EXA24160A are the next generation NPBs from Cubro supporting higher layer functionality based on sessions. The two major protocols behind VoIP are: SIP is the signalling part of VoIP, responsible for call setup. Usually, SIP runs on port 5060. Every Cubro Packetmaster can be used as layer 4 Port filter to filter out SIP traffic. RTP is the user-plane which is usually speech. RTP is characterised as UDP service running on layer 4 Port numbers that have been agreed during call setup using SIP. In order to allow for full call correlation, SIP messages need to be analysed in real-time, and the relevant RTP of a call needs to be determined.

The image shows how Cubro EXA40(D) / EXA24160 analyses the SIP Invite message and finds all other SIP messages and also RTP packets of this specific call. 

EXA40(D) and EXA24160 can handle up to 100,000 rules in parallel - filtering up to 100,000 users at the same time.

Correlation Performance

Benefits of Cubro Solution 

 Delivering flawless VoIP call quality requires complete visibility to the traffic in real time. Using Cubro devices, you can release your existing monitoring tools from traffic that is not needed. The Cubro devices capture/ analyse only the relevant data, and this lowers the cost of monitoring tools. Cubro devices have 10G and 40G connectivity which implies that you can stay with existing 1G tools for traffic analysis. These advanced products can be combined with any other Cubro network visibility solution to cover all monitoring aspects of full network infrastructure. With our solutions you spend less time and money in troubleshooting VoIP related issues and instead utilize time to focus on your core business.

Careful monitoring requires complete visibility into your network traffic, and this is where Cubro Network Visibility can help. Using our comprehensive lineup of high-quality network TAPs (Test Access Points), an organisation will have unfettered access to all the traffic on its network. Cubro's Network Packet Brokers can gather this data for aggregation, replication, and filtering of traffic to monitoring systems and security tools; and that includes the ability to isolate and inspect DNS traffic. 

Thank you Cubro for the article.

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