Network Security Features: DDOS Prevention

Discover the many measures we have in place to protect our customers communications and how security is a key factor of our independent network…

Network security is at our core business values are heavily focused on our customers and protecting their communications. Unfortunately, it is not unheard of within the telecommunications industry for experienced individuals to exploit weaknesses within networks. If a network has not been meticulously designed to prevent such breaches, businesses face private information being shared and their comms being compromised and held to ransom for cash. Outside of this, the continuous threat of DDoS attacks is something which we continually need to protect against.

What is a DDoS attack?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious event in which experienced individuals attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a network. This is done by overwhelming the infrastructure with a flood of internet and voice traffic using bots which are controlled remotely by the attacker. These attacks are often carried out as a form of extortion or blackmail.

What do Fuse 2 do to mitigate these potential attacks?

Our network has been built with resilience and security at its core, and with it being independent we have full control of every aspect. Our team of highly skilled technical engineers monitor our network 24 hours a day and are trained to identify any sign of fraudulent activity.

As well as this, we have state-of-the-art technology in place that can detect any abnormalities that will automatically kick in as the activity is detected.  This includes:

DDoS Detection and Scrubbing Services

To protect ourselves and our customers we have invested in one of the best integrated Netflow cloud platforms called Kentik. This allows visibility of all traffic ingressing the network, the type of traffic and various metrics to monitor not just DDoS based traffic but also detecting carrier links failing and the quality of our network from external networks.  This is a significant investment to Fuse 2 which gives us not only the power to identify DDoS traffic, but to prevent it before the situation escalates. This includes black holing the source traffic IPs using BGP blackhole techniques. As well as this, any traffic destinated for the Fuse 2 networks is imputed into a DDoS mitigation platform ran by NTT & Lumen who operate tier 1 transit links to our networks and have global DDoS mitigation Points of Presence. This ensures that the DDoS traffic is routed to the closest point of presence and is cleaned and blocked.

Time/Day/Destination Routing Control for all customers

Available to all Fuse 2 customers which utilise our SIP Trunks, our TOD (Time of Day) routing controls put the power in customers hands to mitigate the risk of fraud. Fraudulent calls are often triggered by malicious parties during the night, or outside of business hours. By doing this, they increase their chances of going undetected and inflicting maximum damage. With Fuse 2, you can define when you want calls to be allowed – and to which destinations. Want to ensure your communications are locked down to only UK/Europe and only in business hours? Just set up your TOD routing. There’s multiple customisation options, and these can be changed on-the-fly.

CDR Billing Limits

If a malicious party does gain access to your phone system, you want to know your provider can contain the situation. Fuse 2 CDR Billing Limits give you the control to set limits on call spend, to limit any potential cost of a breach. You can set the trigger for a warning, so you know when you’re close to your requested limit. Once the rated calls reach the limit you’ve defined – service is locked down to protect you and your customer.

ENGO Fraud Prevention technology

We’re building out our ENGO fraud prevention technology – Powered by Netaxis. ENGO is an advanced AI platform which monitors network traffic for any suspicious patterns and stops them in their tracks. Updated regularly with the latest data from OFCOM, the platform will continually observe any malicious traffic, report it, and prevent damage to our partners and customers.

To find out more on how we protect our customers communications and our network security, get in touch!