{"id":23099,"date":"2021-10-08T11:33:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-08T15:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sherweb.com\/blog\/?p=23099"},"modified":"2025-09-05T13:09:04","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T17:09:04","slug":"ddos-attacks-crippling-voip-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/r-swca2-app15-sherwebblogprd-c5f5cbg9dbf0btgy.canadacentral-01.azurewebsites.net\/blog\/ai-productivity\/business-solutions\/ddos-attacks-crippling-voip-infrastructure\/","title":{"rendered":"DDoS attacks are crippling VoIP infrastructure\u2014don’t let it happen to you!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the course of the last few months many of the largest VoIP<\/a> networks across North America and Europe have been crippled by sophisticated and specific distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks capable of evading typical prevention measures. Many of these networks serve as the backbone of most VoIP calls and therefore are (or should be) critical infrastructure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These attacks have often come in waves\u2014some lasting 24 hours\u2014and would flood a network with up to 460 gigabits of traffic per second, targeting specific services used in VoIP. A bitcoin ransom demand typically follows.<\/p>\n

European companies Voip Unlimited<\/a> and Voipfone<\/a> were recently attacked, taking down services for a three-day period. Not long after, Canadian company VoIP.ms<\/a> was targeted. Their services were crippled for two weeks, and they’re still working hard at the time of writing to rebuild a more secure network and bring their customers and resellers back online.<\/p>\n

Up next was Bandwidth<\/a>, who carries 80% of US VoIP traffic as well as 911 services. For five days the company suffered intermittent outages that were felt across North America. It\u2019s hard to have a VoIP call to or from the US not<\/span> go through their network at one point or another; big players such as Microsoft, Zoom, Google and Intermedia, just to name a few, all rely on Bandwidth.<\/p>\n

When a company\u2019s telephones don\u2019t work properly<\/a>, regardless of the reasons or who\u2019s at fault, impacted customers are unhappy and think about switching providers. Although this might make sense when the issue is localized to the service provider’s equipment or software, when it\u2019s the underlying carriers or the PSTN (public switched telephone network) in trouble\u2014think Bandwidth and other major players such as Bell, Verizon and Telus\u2014switching from your current provider will most likely not help anything, as they depend on the same backend infrastructure to receive or terminate at least a portion of the calls. Even if they don\u2019t, there are high chances the places you\u2019re trying to call are. You can jump off a sinking ship, but you still have to swim!
\n <\/p>\n

Understanding VoIP technology and the impact of DDoS attacks<\/h2>\n

As far as the technology adoption lifecycle goes, VoIP is still pretty new to the mainstream market. We also rarely hear about daily outages on various PSTN networks across the world. Sometimes cables are cut, hardware breaks and links between telephone rate centers are saturated. It happens a lot more than you think, but most people don\u2019t think twice about it. Have you ever dialed a number on your cell phone, hit send and the phone just went back to its idle screen, then you had to redial? Or had a call drop in the middle of a conversation? All services can go down, it\u2019s just a matter of having plans and being prepared<\/a>.<\/p>\n

VoIP is a totally different technology from legacy PSTN, as are the issues that can come with it. There aren\u2019t necessarily more issues, they\u2019re simply different and therefore stand out to people new to supporting or using VoIP<\/a>. Instead of hearing static on the line, you\u2019ll miss a second of audio. Instead of dialing a number and getting a \u201ccannot complete the call\u201d audio prompt, you might experience a delay in the initial call setup (but will make it through). Instead of reporting call quality issues directly to the phone company, IT staff<\/a> will be called in to check the local network and internet connection.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to remember that this new technology has a lot of positives that go along with it<\/a>. Everyone now has access to an enterprise-class phone system with all the latest and greatest features\u2014voicemail to email, click to call, softphones, multiple IVRs, etc.\u2014without needing to actually purchase and maintain their own PBX hardware<\/a>. Businesses are no longer limited to the amount of analog or digital (legacy) phone lines they connected to their phone system.<\/p>\n

The recent DDoS attacks involved flooding servers with 450Gb of traffic per second, which isn’t easy to generate and maintain even for modern VoIP networks. Businesses still using 20-year-old phone systems with eight analog lines, on the other hand, can be crippled by absolutely anybody able to generate as few as nine simultaneous phone calls. Let that sink in for a second.<\/p>\n

The good news is there are options. It really comes down to a choice every business must make about how far down the disaster recovery<\/a> and emergency preparedness rabbit holes they want to go. Unfortunately, most companies don’t prepare whatsoever because they don\u2019t want to spend the money for the rare times disaster recovery solutions come handy. Recent events may change this mindset, as businesses wake up to the fact that those times might not be so rare after all.
\n <\/p>\n

What options do businesses have to keep the phones ringing?<\/h2>\n

VoIP local survivability<\/h3>\n

The concept of local survivability in VoIP is pretty simple. An edge device, similar to a router, sits at the customer’s site and all VoIP traffic and IP device registrations go through it. This device is also home to backup connectivity to the public telephone network, typically in the form of one or many legacy analog or digital lines, depending on customer size and disaster recovery requirements.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the base idea, but there are different ways of implementing it. Considering that the most crucial and vulnerable part of a phone system is the ability to receive calls<\/a>, we need to think about where the phone number will reside.
\n 
\n\"VoIP
\n <\/p>\n

Option 1: Keep the main number as a legacy analog line, and forward all calls to Cloud PBX<\/h3>\n

This option has the pre-requisite that forwarding on the line is not limited to one simultaneous call. This varies from one phone company to the next.<\/p>\n

In this scenario, the main phone number is a legacy analog line installed on-site at the customer’s location. Should anything happen to the internet connection at the customer site, to the Cloud PBX<\/a> service or to an underlying VoIP carrier, call forwarding to the cloud can be canceled. Calls will start coming in on the local legacy line to the edge device, which will then route the calls to the appropriate IP phones. Outgoing calls will keep going through VoIP if they can, but will have the analog line as a backup as well.<\/p>\n

Pros:<\/h4>\n