Saudi Arabia’s Security Strengthened by DDOS Solution from Arbor Networks

Mobilk - Arbor Networks has announced today the implementation of a DDoS Solution for Saudi Telecom Company (STC) for protection against internet based attacks that impact data centers, networks and applications. 

Originally a national telco, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is now active across the GCC and beyond, from Kuwait to Bahrain, Turkey to India, Malaysia to South Africa. Its rapid growth in little more than a decade and a half has seen it offer landline, mobile and Internet services to ever increasing markets. STC now serves just under 170m customers nationally and internationally - today it is the largest telecommunications company by market capitalisation, total revenue and number of employees in the Arab region.

However, such growth and increased visibility also brings problems. Today, like telcos worldwide, STCs revenue model depends on a shift from traditional voice/SMS services to always on mobile/mobile data paradigms - capacity issues are one concern, but more serious perhaps is the need to assure customers that secure and reliable mobile broadband performance will also be always on.

According to Mahmoud Samy, Regional Director, Middle East, Russia and CIS at Arbor Networks, the ‘secure’ element is a major concern for mobile operators as attacks by rogues or criminals increase globally. Whilst public perception focuses on malware for mobile phones, for telcos the real threat lies in the major potential damage of a large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the network. 

For example, Arbor Networks last annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report saw a quarter of all service providers experiencing DDoS attacks but almost a third not knowing whether such attacks were occurring because of a lack of a suitable security solution.

Realising that its business needed to be secured, STC turned to Arbor Networks who had already implemented world class security systems for many large telcos, including Ooredoo in Qatar. It has now implemented a suite of world-class solutions to monitor, analyse and protect its mobile network operations through two major lines of defence, enhanced by Arbor Networks.

Founded in 2000, Arbor Networks has been a leading provider of network security and management solutions for enterprise and service provider networks. For STC, it has provided a twin defence against DDoS attacks: a centralised DDoS mitigation platform, hosted within STC’s world-class infrastructure, which monitors and protects WAN Internet services against large-scale attacks plus an application-layer security service, which is a hardware-based solution sitting within the enterprise environment to detect internal, smaller-scale attacks as well as actively monitor, alert and protect the enterprise IT environment. 

“Arbor Networks delivers world-class network security services and this partnership demonstrates STCs commitment to service excellence to our customers," Samy added. "No service provider today can afford to ignore the major threat to its business from DDoS attacks. The threat landscape is increasingly complex and most organisations are simply not staffed or budgeted to handle all the challenges on their own, hence they turn to Arbor Networks award-winning solutions."

To support the implementation, which was agreed in March of this year, Arbor Networks provided technical/ sales and pre-sales trainings to STC staff in Riyadh, leading to a strong take-up by key vertical customers for the new solutions, in large part because they see the benefit of a fully managed, end-to-end solution rather than their own on premise security solution for DDoS protection. The sophistication and granular capability of the Arbor Networks solutions means that the multiple attack vectors used by DDoS perpetrators can be more easily and surgically thwarted. Already a number of attacks have been mitigated, although for reasons of client confidentiality STC will not reveal details. 

With mobile provision as the growth driver and profit centre for service providers like STC, it is critical that their mobile infrastructure matches the sophistication of existing wired networks in terms of network visibility and security controls. STC, through its partnership with Arbor Networks, has ensured that its world-class service will continue to excel.