Spirent helps boost cyber defences

Spirent Communications is working with one of the world’s leading online payment platforms to help ensure the integrity of its cyber defenses. The company has adopted Spirent’s CyberFlood solution to test the performance, scalability, and security effectiveness of its network defenses.

As a leading global merchant acquirer bank, the customer enables businesses around the world to accept tens of thousands of e-commerce, mobile, and point-of-sale (POS) payments every day. To ensure it can continue to provide the best service to its customers, the company approached APNT Network Technology, an Elite Spirent partner, for help in further bolstering its cyber defenses by introducing real-world application and threat traffic generation to its testing regime.

“Handling countless transactions every day, the customer’s financial technology platform relies on its next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) to keep it and the transactions of its many customers safe at all times,” said Remco Poortvliet, CTO at APTN. “With performance capacity crucial to its operations, it realized it needed greater flexibility to be able to test its firewall functionality with genuinely realistic traffic generation that could provide a more detailed understanding of how well its defenses were performing and the impact of security policies on end-customer experience.”

Having relied previously on freely available generic software to generate data traffic, the company recognized the need for a more sophisticated solution to deal with the increasingly complex traffic patterns and new security threats that emerge daily. To generate large amounts of highly configurable traffic patterns and profiles to test its firewall, it selected Spirent CyberFlood for the solution’s extreme scalability, ease of use, and flexibility to generate hyper-realistic application traffic.

“Financial services infrastructure is a vital part of our everyday lives, as we entrust organizations to securely handle our in-person and online payments over the internet,” said Spirent’s VP for the EMEA region, Douglas Rankin. “For this reason, enterprises, and financial services organizations in particular, are a key target for threat actors, so it’s vital that these companies constantly test their cyber defenses to ensure they work reliably and effectively and deliver on the quality of experience while maintaining compliance.

“CyberFlood is built for the complexity of the modern threat landscape, allowing customers to test their network security controls such NGFWs, Intrusion Prevention/Detection systems (IPS/IDS), and Web Application Firewalls, under real-world conditions in a lab setting to safely identify and pre-empt potential attacks, performance bottlenecks, and optimize their defenses accordingly.”

CyberFlood can be configured to generate specific traffic patterns and threats - drawn from a constantly updated database of threats – to test network security defenses for potential vulnerabilities, which can then be addressed before they become an issue for a business and its customers. In addition to being able to test for specific threats and help organizations optimize their defenses, CyberFlood can also document issues identified, providing further benefits in terms of assurance, budgetary planning, and regulatory compliance.

”Information privacy regulations, like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, require organizations to prove that they have done everything in their power to prevent threats like data leaks from happening,” said Poortvliet, “which is why CyberFlood is such a powerful tool for them to test and validate their defenses for real-world conditions in a controlled lab environment.”

This is the latest financial services customer to select Spirent solutions after the company announced in November 2023 that it had signed an agreement with a leading global retail and investment bank to design, install, and configure a new testing infrastructure to automate its network of test laboratories.