Meeting enterprise security challenges: Mobinil chooses HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System
By Simon Leech, CISSP CISM CRISC: Manager, Solution Architects EMEA Enterprise Business, HP TippingPoint Group
It’s a great thing when one of our customers is so satisfied with the deployment of our solutions that they are willing to share this with the rest of the world, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to dive in a bit deeper and look at what Mobinil had chosen to buy.
Mobinil is one of the largest wireless service providers in the Middle East, with more than 30 million subscribers and a 3G network that covers 99.65% of the country. As a service provider, Mobinil has a network infrastructure that allows their subscribers, as well as visitors to the country, access to the internet and the ability to browse the web and download email 24 hours a day. To support these requirements, Mobinil has chosen to implement a distributed data center architecture, supporting multiple Internet points of presence across the country.
Mobinil’s security challenges and solution decision process
The Mobinil team started off their decision process by issuing an RFP to a number of IPS vendors that were active in Egypt. This allowed them to gain a thorough understanding of the solutions available on the market and enabled them to make a shortlist of vendors that, at least on paper, satisfied their requirements. To check the claims that the vendors had made, they also tested each product against a number of criteria. These included 5/9s availability, network latency below 150 microseconds, scalability up to 20Gbps traffic inspection on a single 10GbE link and, of course, security effectiveness.
Choosing a new intrusion prevention system
Now comes the Digital Vaccine from DVLabs
The Digital Vaccine itself is the security knowledge behind the product. Each week DVLabs, our internal research group, releases a new DV that provides customers with protection against the latest vulnerabilities and network exploits. We’ve always taken a Virtual Patch approach to writing these signatures, so rather than wait for the exploits, we proactively write the signature to protect the vulnerability that the exploit is using. This means that we offer protection very early on in the threat lifecycle, and don’t need to release new or modified signatures every time a new exploit emerges. This approach to writing signatures fulfilled the security requirements that Mobinil had identified, Mobinil were satisfied that they would have industry leading protection capabilities.
Another aspect of HP DVLabs that particularly impressed Mobinil was the Zero Day Initiative program that DVLabs operates. ZDI is a so-called “vulnerability bounty program’” that pays researchers money to share their discovered vulnerabilities with HP. While the aim of the program is to promote responsible vulnerability disclosure, an important byproduct of the initiative is that we get protection in the TippingPoint IPS for zero day vulnerabilities way before anyone else in the market. Industry research has shown that HP DVLabs finds 8-to-10 more vulnerabilities than other vendors. Having this level of protection in a security product is particularly impressive when looking at the ways that attackers are exploiting undisclosed vulnerabilities.
After Mobinil procured its HP TippingPoint 10Gbps IPS bundles, our professional services department came on site to implement the solution. The IPS devices are configured to constantly clean the networks of malicious and unwanted traffic, and as a result Mobinil has seen improved network performance for mission critical applications.
As Mourad told me, “Thanks to the HP TippingPoint IPS, we have increased network visibility and we are delivering secure services to customers, enduring business uptime and improving the customer experience.”
With the increased security threats mobile users are experiencing today, Mobinil users can feel safe that their provider has joined an ever-growing number of service providers who have chosen to protect their customers with the HP TippingPoint IPS.
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