Improve network safety through better
visibility
Technology magazine Tech Insider reports that nearly 300 million records were leaked across
the world in cyber attacks in 2015 and over $1 billion was stolen. From the 37 million affected in
the Ashley Madison hack to the unprecedented breach of the US federal agency in charge of
background checks, almost every month of 2015 brought up a major new cyber attack. Hackers
hit companies and governments alike month after month, often with shocking results.
In India, according to the KPMG Cybercrime survey report 2015, 72% of Indian companies faced
a cyber attack in 2015. Worryingly, nearly 94% of the 250 C-level executives surveyed indicated
that cybercrime is a major threat. But only 41% said it forms part of the board agenda.
Alarmingly, 54% respondents indicated that spend on cyber defenses is less than 5% of IT
spend.
Clearly, cyber attacks are a growing threat and enterprises are struggling to prevent breaches to
their networks. Poor network behavior visibility leads to gaps in the security posture, ultimately
leading to full-fledged attacks. Without the proper tools and systems in place to continuously
gather, process, compare, and analyze network behavior, IT security professionals are unable to
identify and react efficiently to security incidents. The more network and security intelligence
you have, the better you'll know how to tweak your security policies and tactics to best protect
your organization – and your customers' data.
The reality is that few IT administrators have an accurate picture of what's really going on inside
the network, and lack the automated visibility and analytics tools that can quickly identify,
interpret, and act on threats.
Network security has traditionally focused on border protection strategies and inspected data at
the network layer only. The thinking was that hackers were using unsophisticated methods and
that if you could keep them from entering, then your computers, users, and data were safe.
But an increasing number of attacks are coming from inside the network itself. Many of the
headline-grabbing breaches in the last year began with a compromise that originated within the
network instead of more traditional attacks by hackers attempting to breach a network from the
outside. Hackers are also using social engineering and sophisticated phishing techniques more
frequently to obtain confidential information and network credentials directly from employees.
They can then launch attacks that bypass even the most sophisticated firewalls because
employees unknowingly gave them permission to do so.
Traditional firewalls still do a good job of filtering traffic and limiting access from unwanted
sources. It’s important, however, for today’s enterprises to build on the capabilities of traditional
firewalls by either employing next-generation firewall capabilities or adding software to protect
information that the hackers are trying to capture.
Next generation firewalls offer protection from both internal and external sources. They blend
the features of a standard firewall with quality of service (QoS) functionalities in order to
provide smarter and deeper inspection. In many ways a Next Generation Firewall combines the
capabilities of first-generation network firewalls and network intrusion prevention systems
(IPS), while also offering additional features such as SSL and SSH inspection, reputation-based
malware filtering and Active Directory integration support.
When you deploy a next generation firewall, you’ll still get just as many attacks as you always
did - you just will have more visibility to take corrective steps. All firewalls provide some
capability for logging these attacks for later, manual review. This allows administrators to watch
for attacks that are out-of-the-ordinary. It’s also useful for forensics purposes. If an attacker
does manage to defeat your firewall, you can refer to the firewall’s log and gather information to
determine how the attacker carried out the attack. This log can be useful to law enforcement
officials, if they’re involved in a related investigation.
By placing application-aware firewalls inside the network, administrators can detect internal
threats based on internal traffic. This can augment the methods use to catch telltale signs of a
breach as data is being sent offsite. This allows much more rapid time to discovery, improving
regulatory compliance, ensuring data security and integrity, and stopping the spread of malware
regardless of the infection vector.
About NTT Communications Corporation
NTT Communications provides consultancy, architecture, security and cloud services to
optimize the information and communications technology (ICT) environments of enterprises.
These offerings are backed by the company’s worldwide infrastructure, including the leading
global tier-1 IP network, the Arcstar Universal One™ VPN network reaching 196
countries/regions, and 140 secure data centers worldwide. NTT Communications’ solutions
leverage the global resources of NTT Group companies including Dimension Data, NTT
DOCOMO and NTT DATA.
www.ntt.com | Twitter@NTT Com | Facebook@NTT Com | LinkedIn@NTT Com
About Netmagic Solutions (An NTT Communications Company)
Netmagic, an NTT Communications company, is India’s leading Managed Hosting and Cloud
Service Provider, with 9 carrier-neutral, state-of-the-art data centers and serving more than
1500 enterprises globally. A pioneer in the Indian IT Infrastructure services space - it was the
first to launch services such as Cloud Computing, Managed Security, Disaster Recovery-as-a-
Service and Software-Defined Storage. Netmagic, also delivers Remote Infrastructure
Management services to NTT Communications’ customers across Americas, Europe and Asia-
Pacific region. Recipient of several industry accolades, Netmagic was recently chosen by Frost &
Sullivan for both Third Party Data Center Service Provider of the year and Infrastructure as a
Service Provider of the year at India ICT Awards 2015.
Netmagic is the first cloud service provider in India and in the world, to receive the CSA STAR
certification for Cloud Capability Maturity Model (CCM) version 3.0.1, an industry benchmark
for the specific security requirements of multi-tenant service providers. Besides this, Netmagic
is also empanelled as an IT Security Auditing Organization with CERT-In (Indian Computer
Emergency Response Team).
NTT Communications, world’s largest data center company, has over 140 data centers globally.
NTT Communications is a part of NTT Corporation, Japan – which is ranked 53rd on Fortune
Global 500 list (2014) with annual turnover of USD 112 Bn. With 240,000 professionals in 79
countries, NTT Corporation is the only global partner that supports clients with an integrated
perspective across applications, infrastructure and network.
www.netmagicsolutions.com | Twitter@Netmagic | Linkedin@Netmagic | YouTube@Ne
tmagic
