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FortiSpain
Explorer
February 15, 2026
Question

VoIP - Totally confused

  • February 15, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 307 views

Hi to all,

 

I am quite confused because I have asked the support  department to help me to protect our VoIP system at home.

 

The first agent told me that the FortiGate can not protect against SPAM calls and that the best approach is "to disable SIP ALG on the FortiGate, as it may interfere with VoIP signaling and is not required in most modern deployments".

 

Then, the ticket went to another agent (I do not know why) and this one told me the following:  "Please note that, to protect your VoIP services, the best approach is to use the Fortigate SIP ALG inspection feature". in addition: "With the above configuration, you will not have ghost calls nor unwanted call forwarding nor spam calls".

 

So, one says Yes SPAM and No SIP ALG and the other one, the opposite: No SPAM and Yes SIP ALG.

 

The second agent asked me to run the following:

 

1. Delete the SIP Session-Helper:

config system session-helper

delete 13

end

 

2. Set the ‘default-voip-alg-mode’ to ‘proxy-based’:

config system settings

set default-voip-alg-mode proxy-based

end

 

3. Enable the SIP ALG VoIP profile:

config voip profile

edit default

config sip

set status enable

set rtp enable

set strict-register

enable

end

end

 

4. Clear all existing SIP sessions:

diagnose sys session filter clear

diagnose sys session filter dport 5060

diagnose sys session clear

 

diagnose sys session filter clear

diagnose sys session filter sport 5060

diagnose sys session clear

 

5. Confirm that new SIP sessions are using SIP ALG inspection (sessions should have the tag ’helper=20’)

diagnose sys session filter clear

diagnose sys session filter dport 5060

diagnose sys session list | grep helper

 

diagnose sys session filter clear

diagnose sys session filter sport 5060

diagnose sys session list | grep helper

 

So, I am so confused that I am worried about the codes I have ran in CLI because I do not know what I am doing. So, please, could you be so kind as to let me know which approach is the correct one and if the codes I have ran could mean a vulnerability in our network? And is the FortiGate able to protect against SPAM calls?

 

Thank you very much.

@AEK@mpapisetty 

1 reply

AEK
SuperUser
SuperUser
February 16, 2026

Hi FortiSpain

I personally work since many years on FortiGate and got several issues with VoIP but I've never really understood how it works and how we configure/fix it in the recommended way, that's why I'm convinced that VoIP is a field that needs a real specialist. So unfortunately I can't help here, and I hope some other experienced member can help.

AEK
FortiSpain
Explorer
February 17, 2026

Hi AEK,

 

Thank you very much for replying.

 

All the best!