Infoblox to Highlight DNS Security Best Practices and Technologies at IDC CIO Summit 2015 in Riyadh

Mobilk - Infoblox Inc., the automated network control company, has announced its participation as a gold sponsor at the upcoming IDC CIO Summit 2015 taking place at the Four Seasons hotel, Kingdom Centre Riyadh from September 8-9, 2015. As a company that has been declared by IDC as the market leader in enterprise-grade DDI—the abbreviation for DNS, DHCP, and IP address management solutions - Infoblox will address the critical issue of growing DNS threats – providing unique insights and presenting solutions to combat these cyber attacks with a view to protecting the region’s critical national infrastructure, including telecom, government, banking & finance, oil & gas, transportation and aviation.

Mr. Cherif Sleiman, General Manager, Middle East and Africa at Infoblox, says, “Security of DNS infrastructure should be a top priority for organizations in the Middle East, but unfortunately statistics show that DNS servers and zone data are often neglected, which leave enterprises vulnerable to attacks. DNS sits at the centre of the Internet, connecting people, applications, and devices—making DNS a powerful tool for protecting networks as well as penetrating them. Organizations can enhance their security by acquiring and understanding DNS threat intelligence data, then using that data to block access to malicious domains.” 

“Today, there is a lot more IT infrastructure, some of them which you can’t even see (virtual machines) and the key is to understand how do you actually manage all these networks and endpoints. So IP address management (IPAM) solutions will be increasingly deployed in future. IPAM tools can give organizations the ability to discover all the infrastructure/ endpoints, visualize them and put policies on who and which devices can enter the network and what they can do.  The other thing is that DNS and DHCP services have been taken for granted in the past. Today it is not OK to run these services on routers and general purpose hardware, not only because they are coming under attack, but because they need to be able to scale. They need to be enterprise-grade – secure, reliable services that the organization can depend on, because without them the enterprise will not be able to compute. Infoblox has the largest global installed base of DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (DDI) appliances and we are making concerted efforts to bring our rich experience and technology to the Middle East in order to help regional enterprises enhance the security and reliability of their networks.”

DNS is the address book of the Internet, translating domain names such as www.google.com into machine-readable Internet Protocol (IP) addresses such as 74.125.20.106. Because DNS is required for almost all Internet connections, cybercriminals are constantly creating new domains to unleash a variety of threats that can leverage DNS, ranging from simple malware to exploit kits, phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and data exfiltration. DNS is critical infrastructure for the Internet that can’t be turned off. Cybercriminals recognize this and see DNS as a vector for penetrating government, corporate, and personal networks.

Mr. Sleiman will be a panellist on the security track at the CIO Summit entitled “Evolving Security Priorities: Keeping Pace with the Threats.” The discussion will be centred around how organizations can defend themselves against external targeted attacks and cybercrime; the implications of emerging technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing and social media on enterprise security; the criticality of identity and access management; and major internal and external threats that CIOs need to be aware of in order to improve the overall immunity of the enterprise.