n a chat with VARINDIA, Sanjai Gangadharan, Area Vice President, South ASEAN, A10 Networks discusses the security challenges faced by businesses during the pandemic, how the company is addressing Malware and DDoS threat challenges, concept of Secure on-demand Education etc.
How A10 Networks is addressing the business challenges during these difficult times, where security is the major concern of everyone?
Since the onset of the pandemic, employees have been working remotely at a scale most companies have never seen before. Owing to this, cybersecurity has become the biggest and constant threat for businesses. Network security, data availability, and protection have become a crucial priority to ensure seamless business continuity. In fact, according to a recent study by A10 Networks, 62% of Indian enterprises have accelerated investments in security as a result of the pandemic. Hence, innovating and adopting advanced IT and security strategies to address the challenges of the new normal and empowering our customers with the most secure and available digital experience is our top priority.
With cyberattacks increasing every hour amid the pandemic, cybersecurity is indispensable and must be a top priority for businesses. Also, network protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has become a key concern for organizations in a remote working environment. Hence, employee awareness and adoption of revised robust security systems is a must to safeguard an organization’s network and devices. In addition to this, technological advancements like artificial intelligence and machine learning and automation must also be implemented to help identify cyber-attacks in real time, and protection against DDos attacks.
Also, a ‘Trust Nobody’ approach to security must be implemented to restrict access to the system as much as possible will help to stop data breaches. Businesses must adopt a Zero Trust approach to protect against phishing, malware and ransomware threats. A Zero Trust approach ensures that no user has access to data that they do not depend on for their day-to-day functions. Businesses must also ensure visibility into all users, traffic, data and workloads have uniform security policies applied across all locations to make sure no security loopholes exist.
In the rapidly changing security landscape, how A10 Networks is addressing the issue of Malware and DDoS threat vectors?
DDoS attacks and malware activity continue to grow in frequency, intensity and sophistication. The massive growth of DDoS attacks in the last year alone illustrates how digital services are critically vulnerable. Cybercriminals were very active throughout the year and leveraged the global pandemic to increase attacks, on vulnerable organizations including healthcare, education, and government, making 2020 one of the most active years for cybercriminals.
Ransomware, a specialized form of malware and the most sophisticated and feared attacks in the modern threat landscape, skyrocketed in 2020. In recent months, cybersecurity experts have been alarmed by the convergence of ransomware with data theft and data exfiltration to create an especially pernicious threat. Lately, ransomware attacks on organizations included the theft of massive amounts of data, including financial reports and invoices, and led to months of operational disruption. Effective ransomware protection depends on full visibility into encrypted traffic and to stop any hidden attacks at the network edge. Hence, Zero Trust security / Zero Trust model combined with A10 Networks Thunder SSL Insight has become a critical element of network defense (inside or outside). A10 Networks Thunder SSL Insight fulfils the promise of Zero Trust by restoring full traffic visibility. It enables SSL decryption and SSL inspection to enhance the effectiveness of existing security infrastructure and detect ransomware, malware, and other exploits hiding in encryption traffic.
Also, according to A10’s recent State of DDoS Weapons report, the company tracked 12.5 million DDoS weapons in just the last half of 2020, with an approximately 12 percent increase in each reporting period (2018-2020). SSDP was detected to be the largest reflected amplification weapon and India was observed to host the highest number of drones and bots. This rapidly changing threat landscape fast-tracks the need for automated DDoS protection comprehensively. A10 Networks provides a portfolio of cybersecurity DDoS Threat Intelligence, combined with real-time threat detection, helps defend against DDoS attacks no matter where they originate. It instantly assesses and blocks traffic from millions of known DDoS weapons. Our DDoS Protection solution helps organizations address the growing problem of multi-vector and IoT DDoS attacks to avoid business downtime, lost revenue, and damaged reputation, while also ensuring future protection.
Fast tract digitization brings vulnerabilities, on this backdrop how does your solution secures the entire private cloud infrastructure?
We at A10 Networks are committed to delivering secure application services for on-premises, multi-cloud and edge-cloud environments at hyperscale.
We provide secure and reliable app delivery for hybrid cloud environments, which include private clouds with our application delivery controller (ADC). Our solution addresses the operational complexities associated with securely scaling for hybrid clouds. It empowers application teams with a self-service model that employs integrated load balancing, security, and analytics to enhance agility while providing per-application visibility and insights. The A10 Networks ADC optimizes the delivery and security of cloud applications and services across the customer’s cloud infrastructure. Also, A10 Networks’ advanced load balancers with central management and analytics, provides a unified solution that allows the customer to manage and deliver secure, elastic, cloud-native applications and services centrally across the entire private and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Kindly share the concept of Secure on-demand Education?
Now that education is conducted virtually and not on campus, institutions need a security model that can recognise threats that come from anywhere. The Zero Trust model responds to these challenges by adopting the approach of “trust nobody”—inside or outside the network. Cybersecurity strategies are redesigned accordingly along the following key principles:
• Create network micro-segments and micro-perimeters to restrict east-west traffic flow and limit excessive user privileges and access as much as possible.
• Strengthen incident detection and response using comprehensive analytics and automation.
• Provide comprehensive and centralized visibility into users, devices, data, the network, and workflows.
With learning platforms and resources accessible via the web, it’s essential to protect them against HTTP and web application-based security flaws. Web application firewall (WAF) systems use specific knowledge of HTTP and web-application vulnerabilities to filter or block these attacks without ever exposing the web servers or applications. This helps protect the environment against attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).
