Businesses face a variety of unified communications threats, including AI, toll fraud, and inappropriate use of messaging channels. All of these threats were highlighted at this year's UC Security Panel at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Florida.
The UC Security Challenge session that I moderated was attended by a diverse group of vendors. Mark Collier, his CTO at SecureLogix, Ram Ramanathan, senior director of product management at Ribbon Communications, and Bryan Mack, master principal consultant at Oracle, have previously worked to protect customers from the threat of attacks via voice channels. I took the stage on behalf of a vendor that has focused its efforts on The panel also included Anthony Cresci, senior vice president of go-to-market and partnerships at Theta Lake, which helps businesses meet compliance obligations, and Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom.
Metrigy has been tracking trends in the communications and customer engagement security space for several years. We believe that despite growing security concerns (one in five survey participants reported experiencing a security incident), proactive strategies are I am aware of what is missing. Only 35% of organizations report having a proactive enterprise-wide strategy in place to protect against communications, collaboration, and contact center threats.
AI tops security concerns
AI, like most Enterprise Connect sessions, dominated the discussion this year. That's not surprising. Almost half of companies surveyed in Metrigy's AI for Business Success: 2024-25 Global research studies report the use of AI for customer engagement and internal collaboration. Research shows that security is the main reason for people's reluctance to adopt AI. In particular, IT and business leaders need to worry about privacy, the reliability of AI output, the possibility of attacks on large-scale language models that cause erroneous responses from the AI engine, and protecting AI-generated content from leaks. I'm concerned about the method.
AI is now making inroads into the audio and video space, and deepfakes threaten to disrupt the way we verify employee and customer identities. These new attacks focus on systems used to identify individuals based on their voice or face.
At the same time, malicious individuals and groups are finding ways to use AI to increase the success rate of phishing and social engineering attacks by crafting more realistic emails and texts. Hackers can also use her AI to find the best way to access remote systems.
Voice is still the target
The panel spent a lot of time discussing AI, but it's still an old trick: toll fraud, and it's causing sleepless nights for telecom managers. According to the Communications Fraud Control Association, phone fraud costs businesses nearly $39 billion in 2023, a 12% increase from 2021.
Preventing toll fraud has become even more complex as organizations juggle transitioning to cloud-based calling and contact center platforms while maintaining PTSN access to ensure global connectivity and call routing. A proactive approach is needed here too, panelists said.
Growing concerns about messages
The rise of team messaging for internal collaboration and consumer messaging channels for customer engagement creates another challenge for UC security. Over the past few years, regulators have fined U.S. companies billions of dollars for employees improperly using consumer channels to communicate with regulated customers.
This has led organizations to increase their efforts to monitor or block channel engagement to ensure that supported messaging channels meet their business needs. Simply blocking communications due to business concerns will leave the employee with her IT and what she needs to do her job.
This year's panel discussion highlighted why organizations need to take a proactive approach to securing communication, collaboration, and customer engagement apps and services. It also highlights the importance of security, application, and business teams working together to provide capabilities that balance business and employee needs with the need to minimize the risk of attacks and data loss. Did. Finally, panelists discussed the benefits of investigating vendor products designed to address specific threats and compliance requirements.
Irwin Lazar is President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, where he leads coverage of the digital workplace. His research interests include unified communications, VoIP, video conferencing, and team collaboration.
