UK Based Telephony Service, VOIP Talk, has recently come out and said, that there’s a possibility they could have been hacked and as a result, a large amount of confidential customer information could have been taken. Just recently VOIP Talk emailed all of their customers to alert them of the concerns they had, and strongly suggested that they change all their passwords immediately.
In the email, the VOIP Talk team said:
“Our security and fraud monitoring systems picked up suspicious activity involving external online attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in our infrastructure to obtain customer data,”
DOES THAT MEAN VOIP TALK WERE HACKED?
It seems that they’re not quite coming out and saying they did or didn’t have a cyber attack. From where I’m sitting, it very much looks like someone tried to get into their systems, and as a ‘precautionary’ measure, have asked everyone to change their passwords.
SO WHY CHANGE PASSWORD?
For those of you who have never used VOIP Talk before, it’s a FANTASTIC service. I’m sure it’s capable of so much more, but essentially how I’ve always used it, is that you have an app on your phone that lets you make VOIP Calls. Pretty simple stuff. But here’s the worry. If someone were to have access to your account and password, they could really run up quite a phone tab. And who knows who and why they would be using hacked VOIP Lines to call people. Red Flag. So as VOIP have advised their customers, changing passwords right now is one of the best things to do. And so it seems that VOIP Talk would much rather protect their customers now, then deal with thousands of people calling in to complain about rather large account activities.
WHAT ARE VOIP TALK DOING ABOUT IT NOW
Well, VOIP Talk have released a 6 point plan that they are executing in the upcoming days and weeks.
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They are ramping up their monitoring for more cyber attacks.
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Going back and looking at their entire infrastructure to identify any points of security or vulnerability they may have.
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Introducing more security measures to their customers.
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Working with the authorities to find the people behind this data breach.
IN CONCLUSION
Simple, if you happen to be a VOIP Talk customer, change your password. And when possible, get into the habit of changing your passwords more regularly. Having read all the information around this story from others, and VOIP Talk themselves, it seems to me that they’ve done the right thing. I get this sneaking suspicion that, someone did in fact try and breach their security but failed. VOIP Talk must have been worried that they detected the breach too late and did the right thing by emailing all their customers. With more and more cyber breaches occurring on daily basis, it does make us take our own and others security as top priority. We are constantly encouraging people to shred their confidential papers and destroy their hard drives, because sometimes, when a data breach does happen, it’s not always from the outside, it can also be from within the company….