As we alluded to last month, new forms of Internet communications beget new forms of spam, and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is no exception to the rule.

Where it had already been predicted that VoIP spam, affectionaly referred to as “SPIT” (SPam over Internet Telephony) was just around the corner, that prediction has now been fleshed out with some graphic examples.

In an excellent article at BizJournals, Eric Lai interviews VoIP experts Kevin Kealy, of AT&T Labs, and Gilbert Hu, of AltiGen Systems, and their descriptions of the SPIT to which we can look forward read very much more like your telephone line being hijacked than like the traditional print spam which we are used to.

Examples of the sort of VoIP spam and other shenanigans we can look forward to include hackers taking control of your VoIP network, unceasing pre-recorded messages hawking the same things for which you now get spam in your inbox, miscreants who leave voicemail for others which seems to be from you, and, our favourite, the VoIP hijacker who injects themselves into your telephone call – which you can’t hear, but the people on the other end of the call can – allowing the hijacker to pretend to be you and say rude things to the people with whom you are conversing. Holy Partyline, Batman, way to blow a big business deal!

Is it just us or is using a good old land-line looking like a better way to reach out and touch someone these days?

You can read the Eric Lai’s BizJournals article here.