Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

Spam, hackers, pfishers, desperate people from Nigeria that really need your bank account number…

Via Wired. Privacy Guru Locks Down VOIP. (That’s Voice over Internet Protocol)

First there was PGP e-mail. Then there was PGPfone for modems. Now Phil Zimmermann, creator of the wildly popular Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption program, is debuting his new project, which he hopes will do for internet phone calls what PGP did for e-mail.
Zimmermann has developed a prototype program for encrypting voice-over IP which he will announce tomorrow during a presentation at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas….

“Years ago, people kind of stumbled into e-mail without really thinking about security,” Zimmermann says. “I think that what’s happening today with VoIP is that we’re kind of stumbling into it (as well) without thinking about security.” People don’t think about it, he said, because they’re used to phone calls being secure on the regular phone system — known as the Public Switched Telephone Network.

“The PSTN is like a well-manicured neighborhood, (while) the internet is like a crime-ridden slum,” Zimmermann says. “To move all of our phone calls from the PSTN to the internet seems foolish without protecting it.”

Hmmm….also brings to mind all those folks who are so paranoid about giving out their email address and then stand in the middle of the airplane aisle bellowing their innermost secrets into their cell phone. (Personally, I’m a little creeped out that you can use Google to take a satellite picture of my house…)

All this is why I strongly recommend to my clients they get professional help when they build web sites, networks, and such (and to get as much education as possible on the whole alphabet soup of data and telephony technologies and security methods.)