Everyone hates paying for long distance calling. In recent years, people have gotten away from calling cards and expensive programs on their landlines. For many, the better option was using their cellular phones which offered a cheaper plan for long distance calls. Yet, there is now an even more cost effective way to make calls – through the internet. Better known as VoIP, voice over IP, the system has been increasing in popularity. However, recent development have shown that there is an elevated chance of data breaches occurring with the system. Some companies have responded to the new concern with increased levels of security.

The company leading the charge to raise awareness about the need for security is Newport Networks. Based in the United States, the company is spreading the word about potential data breaches and the vulnerability of individual accounts. According to the vice president of the company, David Gladwin, the market for the logins and passwords is growing. When compared to credit cards, which have been illegally sold on the internet for years, logins and passwords for VoIP have a higher price. On average, they cost around $17, about five dollars higher than credit card numbers. While most people are unaware of the trafficking of stolen information on the internet, there has been an increase in the number of new subscribers to ID theft services, such as Lifelock.

In talking with Mr. Gladwin, he mentions that the threat of losing personal information is not as big of a concern for large companies that use VoIP. Their information is safely guarded in encrypted serves. The people who are really at risk are individual users, who use their home wireless networks to complete the calls. Gladwin said that when calls are completed, the login and password are sent along with the call in a form that is “easily captured and unobscured.” He goes on to explain that over 90% of the VoIP providers do not provide secure networks for calls. The software provided by Newport Networks provides encryption that protects the information of the user and only costs around $5 more a month.

However, there is not a consensus in the field about the prevalence of the crime. One VoIP provider, Skpe, says that it provides a service that includes encryption from end-to-end on all of its calls. Yet, it realizes that it is in the minority of companies that provides such high levels of security for its individual customers. Other analysts, such as Ian Fogg of the company Jupiter, state that this is a problem which has been blown out of proportion. Because the field is relatively new, it has not received the same amount of criminal attention as more established sections, such as the trafficking of credit card numbers. Nevertheless, one should stay cautious and carefully monitor all bills and records which show the calls made on their VoIP account.

So let’s say you’re a hacker/id thief/scammer. You go online to hit the black markets of the internet to see what you can buy today–maybe some stolen credit card numbers perhaps? Oh my friend, you are behind the times–the hot new thing is simply usernames and passwords, according to BBC article. How on earth is a username and password more valuable to you, the hacker/id thief, than a credit card number. You can just plug that number into sites and start buying. The answer is pretty simple: people use the same logins and passwords for everything. Why would you simply want to steal a single credit card number when you could easily access all of their information, banking and otherwise.

Lifelock provides a great service in helping keep your identity safe but at the end of the day there has to be some personal responsibility to go with it. Lifelock serves as a pre-emptive strike against these types of people but once the damage is done then…well, you know how that’s going to end. Anyway, back to the article, apparently VoIP providers like Skype/Vonnage/etc, have yet to curb the budding eavesdropping of the relay of their messages.

So how much do these thieves charge for your information? Apparently about $12 for your credit card number and about $17 for your username and password. As a VoIP user myself I find this particularly disconcerting. On the bright side, though, VoIP is still relatively new and there haven’t been any major breaches of the networks yet. The key to avoiding this particular type of online fraud is simply to make sure you have different passwords to different sites. “I’ll never remember them all”, you say but think again. I’m even willing to tell you how I generate my passwords in the hopes that you’ll do the same thing. Take any site–let’s use Yahoo. I convert the first three letters of the domain name (in this case Yah) into numbers and immediately add that to the end of my “standard” password. I then take the total number of characters in the domain, subtract a secret number from it and then add that to the end. Bam, if you JUST do this you’re already on a better path to protecting yourself from this type of online fraud. Plus, once you have the pattern down you only have to remember ONE pattern and you’ll be able to generate passwords you can “remember” for all of the sites you use without having to use the same one.