Poor Application Attack Visibility is a Major Threat to Carrier Network Security
If you own, operate, or even consume a carrier-grade communications network, it’s a safe bet you are under attack right now. Attack motivations and attack tactics may vary, but one consistency is that high profile, sophisticated attacks on carrier networks are increasing – in both number and severity. Attackers are getting in and causing slow-downs in network speed and performance, service outages and worse.
How Do You Stop What You Can’t See?
Security solutions protect the perimeter of the network against volumetric DDOS attacks, but what they are likely not seeing are the massive application attacks bombarding servers from every angle, looking for ways to sneak in to cause harm. The network security solution deployed by many carriers does not provide a complete picture of what is attacking their networks.
Legacy security solutions are missing the complete picture because they are blind to application attacks. Generally, volumetric attacks at the network layer and even some well-known application attack vectors are sensed and mitigated because this is what the current solution is designed to handle. There is a troubling blind spot, however, when it comes to new and changing application attacks.
During application attacks, targeted commands are sent to applications to overwhelm the CPU and memory. When the attack goes undetected, “noisy traffic” can slow all traffic significantly, or even cause network outages.
You See It, But Now Can You Stop It?
A top complaint in carrier security is that mitigating an attack takes too long, requires manual intervention and has a high rate of false positives. If legacy network security solutions do recognize a new, malicious application attack (like a zero-day attack) it can take minutes or hours to troubleshoot the unknown signature in the application layer.
Mitigation requires labor-intensive manual intervention because there is no automated method to handle zero-day attacks. By the time the security team has developed a strategy, the attackers have likely morphed to new signatures. Carriers need a better way to protect their networks against application attacks.
There Are Answers
Carriers must be vigilant in protecting both their own networks and those of their enterprise customers. A new eBook from Radware – How Do You Stop What You Can’t See: The Imminent Threat of Application Attacks and How to Defend Against Them – can help answer specific questions about how to proactively detect and mitigate application attacks.
This is the first in a series of e-books designed to provide the latest information and thought leadership on security solutions for Carriers and Service Providers. You’ll learn more about why application attacks are on the rise, who is responsible, and how these attacks can penetrate legacy network security solutions. Application attacks impact your ability to provide highly-available, high-performance network services for your customers, so learn the best strategies to protect your network now and in the future.
