unified communications security

Tech Data Adds Unified Communications and Security to Portfolio

If you ask me, Tech Data is coming a little late to the party, but better late than never.

Tech data announced that it is adding a unified communications and a network security business unit to its service offerings.

The official press release from Tech Data contains this quote:

“Tech Data is responding to the growing demand for unified communications and network security,” said Tech Data Vice President, Networking Product Marketing John O’Shea. “Unified communications — the seamless integration of voice, data, messaging, mobility and video over a converged network — delivers new operational efficiencies for end users of all sizes. Meanwhile, the network is becoming more exposed than ever with the explosive growth of wireless, mobile devices and demands for access all the time from anywhere. That creates an array of security issues, especially for key vertical markets implementing these technologies like government, education and healthcare that need to protect sensitive information.”

I don’t disagree, and I commend Tech Data for joining the fray– but unified communications has been hot for some time and networks have been vulnerable since they existed so its not like this was a brilliant epiphane on their part.

What would be cutting edge is if Tech Data merged the concepts and created a Unified Communications Security business unit. That is an area where there is a need that customers aren’t even aware of yet.

Test and Verify OCS Security with OAT

At Voicecon 2009 in Orlando this week Sipera Systems announced a new free tool for assessing unified communications and VoIP security. The OCS Assessment Tool, dubbed OAT, is available as a free download from Sourceforge.

According to the OAT download site, Sipera’s “VIPER Lab created OAT because OCS and other Microsoft products are frequently being used as part of a unified communications infrastructure in many enterprises. Our mission is to help IT manager and security practitioners evaluate the security architecture of their deployments and ensure that their mission-critical communications and systems are protected.”

OAT starts off with a dictionary attack against a known user. Once the password is determined, OAT can run a variety of UC / VoIP attacks against the OCS environment. OAT can be run internally, as if an authorized user is performing malicious or unauthorized activities, or as an external attack against OCS. OAT can perform the following functions:

• Online Dictionary Attack
• Presence Stealing
• Contact List Stealing
• Single User Flood Mode (Internal)
• Domain Flood Mode (Internal)
• Call Walk (Internal/External)
• Play Spam Audio
• Detailed Report Generation

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BCI Chooses Sipera for UC Security

Chile-based Banco de Credito e Inversiones (BCI) has chosen Sipera to secure their unified communications infrastructure. Using Sipera’s IPCS unified communications security appliances provides BCI with real-time unified communications security backed by the research and expertise of Sipera’s VIPER Lab.

Sipera also enables BCI to leverage more cost-effective SIP trunking rather than relying on trunk lines, and allows BCI to deploy unified communications more efficiently and provides quality of service monitoring and reporting that BCI didn’t previously have. You can learn more about Sipera unified communications security appliances and services at Voicecon in Orlando this week. Sipera is at Booth 1500.

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