We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but it seems to me that the Voice over IP (VoIP) industry is in need of security training and improvements.

There’s been much noise over VoIP security lately, though not much of the what’s been voiced is new or innovative. Much of it just parrots old advice: segment the network traffic and install a VoIP firewall.

The fact that VoIP security discussions haven’t advanced much beyond what applies to ordinary networking is a sign that a lot of new education is needed.

Some think education alone is not enough. For example, Stephen Northcutt, Director of Training and Certification for the SANS Institute, thinks that the whole technology needs a major overhaul.

“If I had my way, I would have the creators of VoIP stop everything and redesign this with security in mind from the get-go.” Northcutt said in a recent interview.

IT professionals need to understand the nature of the VoIP traffic on their networks. VoIP is much more than just another real-time LAN application and securing it requires broader security methods.

Overver the coming weeks, Voxilla will take a close look at VoIP security with our upcoming three part series on VoIP confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

And, we’ve launched a Voxilla forum dedicated to VoIP Security issues in hopes of fostering positive discussions over these issues. Come and visit

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The TalkSwitch User Group is now a member of the Voxilla Forums.

TalkSwitch is a SIP-based hybrid phone system that can be connected to both the traditional telephone network and the Internet. With broadband access, and the optional VoIP module, businesses can place branch-to-branch calls over the Internet and access SIP-based service provider networks.

The Voxilla Forums run on vBulletin and I spent most of the day looking for a product that would automatically close old threads.

We get a number of new users that reply to an old thread with an unrelated issue, instead of opening a new thread. Our moderators end up spending a lot of time breaking the new posts off into new threads.

I couldn’t find a product that would run on our version of vBulletin and was easy to configure, so I wrote my own Close Old Thread solution. In the spirit of open source, I’ve made the product available for download on vBulletin.org.

Skype is a popular service, but it is proprietary and only works with Skype approved hardware and software - the AOL Chat of voice. Is it the future direction of VoIP or will standards-based open-source solutions replace it?

The business community is starting to explore the issues surrounding Skype in the corporate environment. Will Skype’s proprietary solution prevail in the business environment? Or have businesses had enough of the closed system (black box on the wall with the $500 phone) solution?

The Voxilla Forum Skype User Group is the place to discuss these questions.

If you haven’t seen the Voxilla Forums in a while, take a look. We’ve added a RSS feed for each of our forums.

RSS feeds are another way to access content on the Internet. News readers and news aggregation sites use RSS as a standard way to gather content.

If you use a news reader, you can now subscribe to your favorite forums. Just click on the RSS icon next to the forum name.