Oracle’s Session Border Controllers (SBCs) have long been an essential element in protecting global IP communications networks against all forms of denial of service attacks. As these networks evolve, however, new forms of telephony fraud, spoofing, cyber threats and other forms of malicious network behaviour continue to rise.

According to PwC’s 2022 Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey, cyber crime currently poses the biggest threat internationally, with two-thirds of all worldwide economic fraud in the past year targeted toward technology, media and telecommunications organisations, who experienced the highest incidence of all global industries. Furthermore, the report analysis indicates that more than 46% of global enterprises experienced such disruptive fraud incidents in the last 24 months, and of those affected businesses with more than $10 billion USD in revenue, at least 18% of them suffered a financial impact of $50 million+ USD in losses just from their most disruptive fraud incident alone.

For the affected smaller businesses with less than $100 million USD in revenue, the impact was even higher, with 22% of them suffering from losses of $1 million USD or more in revenue.

Similarly, according to the Hiscox’s 2022 Cyber Readiness Report, the median cost per respondent of all global cyber attacks suffered rose 30% in the past year, with larger enterprise businesses reporting an average of more than 1 100 attacks per year. Additionally, the trends showed increased growth in the frequency of such attacks towards medium and small-sized businesses as hackers continued to focus more of their attention in that direction.

Fortunately, service providers and enterprises can collectively combat such cases of telephony fraud in their respective networks by leveraging the power of Oracle Communications Security Shield (OCSS). The OCSS solution can effectively eliminate unwanted calls, threats and session-based cyber attacks via a sophisticated data analytics engine that makes real-time call treatment decisions and applies multiple levels of protection controlled through user-defined policies and rulesets. OCSS is empowered to perform dynamic risk assessments to validate every call traversing a given network and automatically enforce policy-based call handling.

In summary, thousands of global enterprises worldwide trust Oracle to secure their voice networks, and with the application of the OCSS cloud solution, businesses can ensure accurate, real-time interception and mitigation against criminal behaviour perpetrated against their mission-critical communications networks and secure the best defence available against telephony fraud.

All credit to Anthony Limoli, Director Strategic Enterprise Accounts, Oracle Communications Consulting (OCC) Sales, for these international insights.

In the South African unified communication (UC) market, we still see enterprises not focusing enough energy on countering call fraud. With data networks protection being implemented and improved over many years, fraudsters now turn to the next best option – (SIP) call fraud.

“It is not enough for enterprises to off-load this responsibility to their service providers,” says Tjaart de Wet, Managing Director at Q-KON South Africa. “Service providers have a specific requirement and strategy to counter fraud on their networks, which is different to the need of a call centre or enterprise.”

Oracle Security Shield is based on a subscription model, making it a cost-effective, low-risk proposition. It does caller profiling and generates enforcement actions, all in real-time, all pre-answer. It utilises artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to detect anomalous traffic and threats, so it’s learning your unique network along with its traffic patterns, which is better news for the enterprise – it requires minimal resources from the enterprise to support solution.

“Q-KON South Africa has been providing the local market, through our reseller-integrator channel, with the most advanced UC platforms for more than 20 years, and with Oracle’s Security Shield we would like to continue our value add by saving our customers costs on their commercial crime insurance premiums, preventing their call centre agents from wasting time on no-value calls and protecting their VOIP networks from being overloaded,” De Wet concludes.