Johannesburg, 21 Jun 2022
Landline and traditional telephone services have always been trustworthy, terminating in physical locations which are known to telephone companies, with known bill payers. However, with modern voice over IP (VOIP) technology, it is relatively easy for fraudsters to use caller ID spoofing and automated systems in what are known as vishing and other attacks such as robo-calling and call flooding to avoid detection by law enforcement agencies. Cyber attacks have caused many organisations to experience business disruptions from stolen data, as well as lost time, wasted resources, revenue losses, poor customer satisfaction and legal costs.
Today’s cyber criminals are targeting the communications infrastructure of enterprises like never before and are succeeding well beyond most executives’ perceptions. The impact has been so profound that the World Economic Forum in its Global Risks Report 2021 ranked cyber attacks and data fraud in the top three of “most worrisome” trends for companies globally, and in the United States, the FBI reported a record-breaking 791 790 cyber crime complaints, a 69% increase from the previous year.
Communications-based threats, such as theft of service, harassment calls and account takeover disruptions can seriously harm your brand and cause significant financial damage. Further, today’s legacy systems rely on historical knowledge and rigid rules, which drives heightened volumes of false-positive alerts for an already overloaded security staff to sift through.
Oracle Communications has, over recent years, developed a solution to the problem. Oracle Communications Security Shield Cloud (OCSSC) evaluates calls crossing an enterprise’s network edge, detects malicious call signatures and behaviours, and produces a risk assessment for each call, all in real-time and all pre-answer. Oracle Security Shield (OCSS) provides observability of your telephony traffic, type of calls, risks and actionable insights enabling smarter investigations.
Q-KON SA, an importer and distributor of unified communication platforms for more than 15 years, is pleased to introduce an advanced Oracle Telephony Cybersecurity product into the South African market.
Oracle Security Shield leverages machine learning-based (ML) behavioural analytics to look behind the incoming phone number and tracks actual call behaviour indicative of spam activity, malicious activity and intent. Security Shield generates a risk assessment score that provides an easy-to-understand classification. Using the results from ML-based behavioural analytics, it provides information on the intent of a call (for example, probable scam or fraud call, a likely robo-call, or probable telemarketing call, etc).
Guided by the risk assessment, call filters can be enabled that determine how you want to treat calls. User controlled call filters allow aligning the call’s handling with an enterprise’s own tolerance for risk.
Says Tim Pryce, Business Development Executive at Q-KON SA: “Security around data networks has increased over recent years, but there has been little or no protection available for voice networks, until now, with Oracle Security Shield! As cyber criminals start using AI technologies to launch more sophisticated attacks and interactive intrusions, organisations must also employ AI and ML to safeguard their VOIP networks in a more sophisticated manner.”
With unwanted and unwelcome calls filtered out, or at least flagged, you can avoid costs by reducing time wasted on answering these calls. Moreover, with higher risk call identification, you can save on verifying or authenticating users by only sending higher risk callers to an advanced verification process and low risk callers to an expedited process. Security Shield protects enterprises from telecom-based threats, such as theft of service, harassment calls and account takeover.
For more information on Oracle Security Shield, please visit https://www.oracle.com/industries/communications/enterprise/voice-security/.
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