Resource Center

Addressing security in your conference calls

If there is one thing the news keeps telling us, it’s security risks are increasing and attempts at your valuable information are getting more intelligent and complex.

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center and CyberScout, organizations in the United States were hit by more than 1,000 data breaches in 2016, the majority of these incidents stemming from hacking and phishing attacks.This in turn is leading to a number of businesses putting a great deal of budget to deal with increasingly sophisticated attacks.

How secure are your conference calls?

In this move to address these new and growing threats there are some relatively simple ways in which security is getting overlooked. For instance, how do you approach the security of your remote meetings? Do you know the identity of everyone who is on your conference call? How can you be sure your screen is only shared with those who should have access to see it?

A survey by Research Now, found that at least 99% of conference callers said they had hosted a meeting where they were not entirely sure of the identity of all those joining the call. With reservationless conference calling, there is a significant lack of visibility when it comes to call attendees, as dial-in numbers and access codes are often recycled and reused, passed onto any number of users over time.

It is not unusual in fact, for companies and employees to have dial-in numbers and access codes in use for years, passed on to attendees both inside and outside of the organization. Calls can overlap, and important information or delicate conversations are unintentionally overheard. With so much emphasis placed on the security of written documents – such as emails – verbal communications are often overlooked, but can be just as damaging when exposed.

For day-to-day remote business meeting, the need to roll call or self-identify when speaking on the line becomes an all-too-common practice, and an unnecessary one at that. We then see a significant portion of every call devoted to caller and speaker identification, wasting valuable time that should be used for getting important business done asking “who’s just joined?” and “who’s that talking?”

Finding out who’s on the line

There are a number of approaches you can take to address this but few are dependable across use cases.

What you need is a conferencing tool that eliminates the need for roll call by identifying and displaying exactly who has joined and when they are talking throughout your meeting. Moving users away from reservationless dial-in toward dial-out is one way to approach this. It’s easy to use and guarantees visibility into the identity of all those who join your meeting.

 

Read “The Real Story on Conference Call Security” for more on this topic.

 

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