Nokia builds Europe’s ‘biggest anti-DDoS solution’ for an IXP environment

NL-ix specialises in ‘interconnection services’ for data centres, and the deployment of Nokia Deepfield Defender across its network is pitched as a move to better protect customers and operations by stopping DDoS attacks ‘in seconds.’

Deepfield Defender detects DDoS using AI-driven big data analytics and drives mitigation directly on the Nokia FP5-based routers, we’re told, which NL-ix is deploying across its entire network. The solution is supposed to detect all types of DDoS quickly and drive ‘agile, network-based mitigation on the existing Nokia routers, with minimal or no impact on customer traffic.’

It purports to ensure ‘advanced DDoS security’ in order to stay ahead of the latest generation of threats, which anyone involved in security will tell you is a constantly evolving space, as well as providing some scalable protection and ‘security-enhanced service offerings’ to enterprises, particularly those in ‘critical’ industry segments.

All in all, the pitch is that beefing up DDoS protection with Deepfield Defender results in ‘less or zero downtime’ for customers.

“Security is becoming a paramount concern for everyone, especially as we are seeing shorter, distributed, more sophisticated and impactful DDoS attacks ramping up in the recent months,” said Jeff Smith, Vice-President and General Manager of Nokia Deepfield.

“Our solution combines Deepfield Defender’s AI/ML-driven DDoS protection platform and Nokia’s sophisticated IP routers with our patented Secure Genome, a unique cloud-based data feed that tracks the security context of the internet and has visibility into over 5 billion IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. These capabilities will empower NL-ix to improve protection for their European enterprise customers, while lowering costs, removing human errors, and improving NL-ix’s overall scale of security and automation.”

Jan Hoogenboom, CEO at NL-ix added: “This is a big win as it’s not only the first security-enhanced service offering, but also the first anti-DDoS solution deployed by an IXP, demonstrating our place as a key innovator in Europe. Our DDoS protection will strive for zero downtime for enterprises, providing security across their entire area of operations.

“Our solution performs mitigation directly on Nokia routers instead of using a remote, dedicated scrubbing center, which maintains low latency and keeps transport costs down. As a result, we can act as a “one-stop-shop” for Europe-wide connectivity and security, where our customers don’t need to work with multiple parties or have complex arrangements to be protected by a third party.”

You’d be hard pressed to find any piece of comms related to security which doesn’t in some way, shape or form paint a picture of ramping threats, and the ways in which new technologies can mean new attack vectors for corporations, nations and individuals. And so the arms race between the security industry and hackers goes on.  

Last week BT held its Secure Tomorrow event at its Adastral Park research centre in Ipswich, and some of the discussions on stage as well as data that was released alongside the event concerned an acceleration in cybersecurity threats.

There was plenty of emphasis in the opening speech placed on ‘staying ahead of bad guys’ with regards to quantum computing and AI, and BT put out a release which said it logs 2000 signals of potential cyber-attacks a second, or 200 million per day, and pointed to a 1234% annual rise in new malicious internet protocol (IP) scanners recorded across its networks in the 12 months to July.