The costs of telephony fraud and why you should know…
An independent survey incorporating 250 respondents from across private and public sector organisations of varying sizes, commissioned by Damovo UK, revealed some disquieting results.
Almost half of UK businesses are unaware of what telephony fraud is or take no measures to protect against it, despite 40 per cent acknowledging that their telephony network has faced security threats in the last year. Remarkably, only 17 per cent monitored their voice network constantly, yet 40 per cent of businesses admitted to having suffered financially because of this lack of security. In real terms it showed that 61 per cent of respondents in organisations with over 400 employees incurred losses above £5,000 because of telephony fraud (with 35 per cent incurring losses in excess of £10,000). Despite this startling figure, 46 per cent had not had a telephony audit in the past 18 months.
A lack of understanding of the risks from not protecting your voice network with the same concern as the data network can incur not only financial losses – security breaches also encompass intellectual property loss. 43 per cent of respondents with over 600 employees said that they had suffered either intellectual property or financial losses as a result of telephony fraud.
The research also revealed that:
- Mobile devices are among one of the key concerns for businesses, yet over half of respondents (52 per cent) with more than 400 employees stated that they felt that their voice network was not as secure as their data network.
- 48 per cent of respondents with over 600 employees consider mobile devices to be the biggest security threat to their corporate networks.
- A common practice of telephone fraud, Internet Bridging*, also seems to go virtually unnoticed - 45 per cent of respondents with over 400 employees do not have any measures in place to protect against it and 38 per cent of the same respondents were unaware of this as a threat at all.
- The majority (76 per cent) of respondents with over 400 employees who suffered toll fraud were affected by staff or contractors who had made unauthorised long distance calls.
Want to find out more about how you can protect your business? For further information on voice security please email talktous@damovo.com or visit our section on Security.
*Bridging is where an employee connects to an ISP from an analogue line from the corporate PC thus bypassing the corporate firewall.
Thank you to all of you who have forwarded suggestions for subsequent instalments of Interpreter, these have been duly noted. Please keep up the suggestions and feedback to talktous@damovo.com
