2014 year

SoberCouncil:

Are there any plans to implement an anonymous supervision feature to conference calls in future Porta releases? A customer gave the following example:
"Let's say, hosted PBX has 4 extensions and 3 extensions are engaged in conference call. 4th extension wants to supervise/hear the call, but he doesn't want others to notice him."
Similarly, caller A can speak to caller B without caller C hearing or without caller C knowing that caller A exists

Mike H.:

+1

A version of this would be a useful feature and is commen on PBX's in call centre environments.

It is often used for training purposes, where a supervisor can listen in on an agent call with a customer and advise the agent without the customer being aware.

It would need appropriate controls in place, maybe a priority level 1 to 5 whereby only accounts with a higher priority can monitor accounts with a lower one and a check box to enable/disable the feature per account.

Mike H.:

Just giving this one a bump It is something we are being asked for more and more of late. It seems to be companies coming from PBX's with call centre type environments hanging off them.

Grzegorz K.:

One of our customers would like the following fraud prevention features to be added to PortaBilling:

"1. Can we allow whitelist and black list of IPs per customer in our billing/system?
2. Can we block specific user agents like eye beam, sip cli ?
3. Can we do double authentication of calls - i.e. authentication by account ID and also the MAC address of IP device?"

PortaONE:

You can block IPs "globally" using call handling rules or via automated fraud detection script.
I am not sure what is the business case when IP is allowed for customer A, but not customer B (why don't you just use IP authorization for customer A?). Please open a feature request and provide use cases.

"2. Can we block specific user agents like eye beam, sip cli ?
3. Can we do double authentication of calls - i.e. authentication by account ID and also the MAC address of IP device?"

I am afraid it is impossible unless all your clients reside on the same physical network segment as PortaSwitch as opposed to being on Internet. MAC is only visible within your LAN.

Mike H.:

You can block specific user agents using IPtables string matches, there are a few articles available on the internet for this very thing.
Also block ping to your sip server from anywhere except your own ip's and portaone's, it will reduce the number of people finding you

BigRed:

I see you were having the same hack problems like us? (eyeBeam).
We wrote our own script, that runs every X minutes.
It checks registrations and blocks accounts (block, put in quarantaine and disconnect active sessions) that do not match IP, or that have a blacklisted UA string, etc.
We also block by country. So, if customers are using the UA outside of the normal list of countries, it blocks immediately upon registration.
We made a custom field, so customers can turn this on/off per account.
Additionally, we made checks that checks for calling to expensive destinations above a certain amount.
During office hours, we will receive notifications. Outside of office hours, we will receive notificatins, the customer account will be blocked and the active sessions will be disconnected.
Works GREAT.
I would love to further develop this together with portaone, I am sure we can even improve it further.