Call quality, unwillingness to pay extra for third-party tools, and lack of motivation by vendors to increase processing power of their devices are some of the reasons VoIP has become a favorite target by hackers, a new study reveals.

John Kindervag, a senior analyst at Forrester Research whose study was quoted in a recent report by SearchUnifiedCommunications.com, disclosed that enterprises are more concerned with call quality than security. According to the report, encrypted VoIP calls result in considerable voice degradation.

Many enterprises are also unwilling to pay a premium for security features, providing vendors no reason to develop them. As a result, many routers and switches often don't have the capacity to support additional traffic that often results when encrypting voice packets.

One person interviewed for the story told SearchUnifiedCommunications.com that simultaneous sessions on his devices were reduced from 70 to 100 when he turned on encryption. As a result, he plans to enable it only if regulatory compliance demands.

According to SearchUnifiedCommunications.com, a third of hacking attacks globally in 2010 were directed at VoIP infrastructures. You can read the full article here. Mr. Kindervag's study is available here.