Omantel foils over 120 million cyber-attacks in 2020

Resilient networks: Signalling attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDOS), web application attacks, and user profiling, endpoint and behavioural incidents among a flood of threats tackled by operator last year @conradprabhu The majority state-owned Omantel, the Sultanate’s biggest integrated telecom services provider, says it thwarted tens of millions of different types of cyber-attacks across its nationwide network last year. The biggest threat — in volumetric terms — was posed by web application attacks where hackers exploit known vulnerabilities in web apps primarily to steal data or engage in other types of cybercriminal activity. In 2019, web application attacks accounted for nearly half of all successful data breaches globally, say experts. According to Omantel, a staggering 123 million web application attacks were prevented across its entire network last year. “Omantel’s resilient security infrastructure and policies have enabled us to achieve incident-free services and an incessant network uptime throughout the year. Omantel is the key enabler in supporting the Sultanate to remain the third global best in diffusing cyber-attacks,” the publicly listed mobile operator stated in the Management Discussion & Analysis report issued together with the 2020 financial report earlier this week. In addition, the operator’s corporate security infrastructure thwarted 435K signalling attacks – attempted hacks that take advantage of a weakness in the design of Signalling System 7 (SS7) networks to enable data theft, eavesdrop on communications, text interception and location tracking. Furthermore, Omantel says it fended off over 7,925 high intensity distributed denial-of-service (D-DOS) attacks. D-DOS attacks are malicious attempts to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. Adding to the tidal wave of cyber-attacks mounted on the operator last year were in excess of 24k user profiling, endpoint and behavioural incidents — all of which were successfully tackled, it said. Omantel credited its success to “proactive steps” it had taken to ensure that customer data, information and logical assets remain protected from the high vulnerability of cybercrimes. “As new circumstances evolved from the pandemic, Omantel revisited its Business Continuity programme and incident response plans especially to protect critical elements, ramped up work-from-home and remote access capabilities, prioritize investments in our network security, ramped up our SOC (Security Operations Centre) infrastructure protection and implemented data leakage prevention practices across the organisation,” it said. The company also expanded its D-DOS threat detection and mitigation capacity to protect the operator and its customers against large scale volumetric threats (of up to 40 Gbps on premise and 14Tbps through cloud), it stated.