Asterisk PBX Security

As attacks become more sophisticated over time, it's crucial to ensure your Asterisk system is as secure as possible.

  • To make brute-force attacks on your system more difficult by not revealing valid extensions on your system, add the following line to the appropriate *.conf file—for example, sip.conf or sip_general_custom.conf:          

    alwaysauthreject=yes

  • To bind your Asterisk phone system to communicate on a non-standard port, add the following line to the appropriate conf file—for example, sip.conf or sip_general_custom.conf. By implementing this, your system will no longer communicate on port 5060, and will instead use the value specified by ####, where #### is your SIP communication port:          

    bindport=####

  • If you are using Outbound Allowed IPS and not using SIP credentials in the PBX, remove the username and password from your Flowroute peer details.    

  • Install and configure Fail2ban so that IPs attempting authentication with your Asterisk PBX system will be blocked from contacting your system.    

  • If possible, reduce the default RTP port range your Asterisk phone systems uses. If you are not using more than 100 concurrent connections, you can reduce the RTP range in /etc/asterisk/rtp.conf from 10000-20000 down to 19000-20000. This reduces the number of open ports on your system.    

  • Change the default ARI, AMP, and FOP passwords in the amportal.conf. It is ideal to lock-out the AMI port—the default is 5038 using IP Tables from anyone outside your network.

    NOTE: This file only exists on systems which have the FreePBX installed.  

  • Ensure that your Asterisk phone system uses strong passwords and that no blank password is set as a default password. You can generate strong passwords from any of the following sites:          

  • Use a Firewall to restrict traffic from and into your system. For example, this might be done using IP Tables. See IP Tables for information on using IP Tables.    

  • Review your system logs as well keep your system patched and up-to-date from application flaws.