Cyber security can see you teefy
Service provider Illuminate has been asked to run cyber security services, using its analytics instincts and specially designed tools to nip problems in the bud for a national telecommunications network. Its brief is to build a sort of online Edinburgh Castle (see pic) which fortifies its Scottish client and gives splendid vantage points it many detention spots for isolating intruders.
Though based in the capital Illuminate will provide its Watchdog cyber intrusion detection and forensic analysis solution for a country-wide communication network. Watchdog will monitor, detect and forensically inspect traffic anomalies at points of network interconnect. Watchdog is designed to protect against security vulnerabilities within the legacy communications protocols such as Signalling System 7 (SS7) and the its more modern equivalent, Diameter. In future the role will expand as 5G Roaming traffic presents the hackers with more opportunities to penetrate the fortress.
Illuminate has formed a pact with P1 Security, a ten year veteran of telecom insecurities, which will pass on the secrets of its software tools suite to Watchdog.P1 has unique knowledge of telecom monitoring, signalling and intrusion detection systems. It claims that its unique vulnerability knowledge base knows every weakness known the hacker groups and more.
The collaboration between Illuminate and P1 Security lets operators, government agencies and law enforcement concentrate on vulnerabilities in the critical network infrastructure. It knows how to spot and identify attacks at scale, on networks serving tens to hundreds of millions of subscribers and supporting economies of one or several countries at a time. The number of enterprises affected by the security of these infrastructures is embarrassingly high and the national security value derived from such level of protection brings nation-states to the forefront of information and technology security, according to Illuminate managing director Dr Iain Goodfellow.
“We are honoured to have been chosen to protect this national communications network,” said Goodfellow. Illuminate has spent decades working in the network assurance space and has developed significant experience in identifying unusual behaviour in networks, so it’s perfectly positioned to be the cyber security for a telco network, Goodfellow said.
Watchdog is good at spotting denial of service attacks, voice and message redirect or financial fraud. It can spot an anomaly and flag it before you can say SS7 and immediately stick a P1 Security signalling on it. In te words of the military tattoo (see pic) any army of Distributed service deniers will instantly be spotted on the landscape’s wee bit hill and glen. Illuminate will soon send these armies homeward ‘tae think again’.