Over the past year, enterprises have faced a wide range of risks to their business as the pandemic created new challenges for organizations and exacerbated existing ones, like cybersecurity. Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report saw 5,258 data breaches between November 2019 and October 2020 – third more breaches than the previous year! According to the report, phishing attacks increased by 11%, ransomware attacks rose by 6%, 85% of breaches involved a human element, and attacks on web applications represented 39% of all breaches.
The growing instances and sophistication level of cyberattacks are of constant concern to security professionals — and for good reason. The average cost of a major breach is now $8.19 million, not to mention the significant reputational damage incurred to a company’s brand.
Organizations need reliable protection across their global environment to secure their digital presence against risks and downtime while ensuring that customers and employees enjoy consistent, uninterrupted access.
Given the loss of traditional network perimeters with the pandemic-driven shift to remote work — and an increasingly dynamic threat landscape to navigate — enterprise security teams are stretched thin, even as their responsibilities have become much more complex. However, many teams are still defending company infrastructure and applications with an uncoordinated mix of solutions from different providers.
Managing and integrating those different solutions is complex and expensive and often results in gaps in operational processes, hindering their ability to respond effectively to threats. Companies need a scalable and reliable service provider that leverages best-in-class technology, industry best practices, and specialized expertise to deliver consistent, SLA-driven services that will reliably protect the data center, cloud, multi-cloud, and/or hybrid customer environment.
The Neustar Security Solutions product suite ensures availability and protects organizations across their entire application ecosystem, including DNS, network, infrastructure, and at the application layer. With DNS security, DDoS, and WAF protection, Neustar services significantly reduce the threat risk to customer applications. Neustar’s comprehensive, always-on approach is ultra-secure, enabling organizations to safely embrace the digital world around them without fear of losing critical information or tarnishing their brand.
How Neustar Enables Global Business to Thrive Online with an Always-on and Ultra-secure Cloud Service
Neustar, an information services and technology company and a leader in identity resolution, helps companies secure digital presence against risks and downtime by unlocking the most recent information needed to authenticate connections, ensure transactions, enable compliance and optimize operations. Using global cloud-based services with machine learning and data analytics technologies, Neustar’s application security, DNS, security intelligence and web performance management solutions enable organizations to execute consistent, uninterrupted, quality interactions while providing:
The Largest DDoS Network: Neustar has one of the industry’s largest purpose-built security networks, with 14 global data centers and 12+ Terabits per second (Tbps) of scrubbing power to deliver unmatched DDoS mitigation and application layer security.
“Our broad global footprint provides low latency performance in the markets where our customers operate while keeping a high capacity per node to eliminate the possibility of congestion. This scalable, cloud-based DDoS solution makes Neustar one of very few pure plays in cybersecurity services with a best-of-breed network-based approach,” says Brian McCann, President, Neustar Security Solutions.
The Most Secure and Reliable DNS Service: Neustar’s UltraDNS capabilities have a 21-year track record of being among the fastest and most robust always-available solutions in the industry, and its global network of more than 30 nodes can handle over 9 trillion queries a day at a rate of more than 100 million queries per second. UltraDNS has robust security and availability features including the use of Neustar proprietary DNS technology, automated DDoS protection, support for DNSSEC, and advanced traffic management.
Security Intelligence: Neustar’s machine learning technologies outperform competitors in assessing the trustworthiness of IP addresses, identifying human versus nonhuman traffic, and turning cybersecurity data into actionable insights.
“Thanks to our analytics expertise and our DNS network, we have threat mitigation data that no one else in the world has. We run DNS and DDoS networks using our intelligence, augmented with external feeds, and then learn from the cycle of networks, customers, and data to continually improve our processes,” Brian adds.
Cloud-First Approach: Neustar has been in the cloud-based security services business since 2006, and many of the world’s foremost experts on cybersecurity work at Neustar.
“With the sophistication and complexity of cyberattacks increasing every day, our dedicated teams are up to the challenge of keeping our clients’ networks safe and secure,” says Carlos Morales, Chief Technology Officer, Neustar Security Solutions.
Dedicated Technical Account Managers for Large Customers: Neustar specializes in dedicated technical account managers to help large customers successfully expand, migrate and adapt to their evolving needs, then manage independently when they are settled and ready.
Neustar Helps State of Alaska Save Millions of Dollars by Enabling it Identity Fraudulent Claims Online
The state of Alaska manages a Permanent Fund Dividend that returns more than $1 billion of oil and gas profits to its residents each year. The fund attracts a large number of fraudsters. The state approached Neustar to obtain the latter’s UltraGeoPoint data.
Neustar’s global data collection network, advanced machine learning algorithms, and network geography analysts gave Alaska accurate insights into the IP addresses of applicants. UltraGeoPoint was able to identify compromised or suspicious hosts hiding behind anonymous IP proxies.
This improved IP intelligence data enhanced the state of Alaska’s monitoring capabilities, allowing for the detection and reduction of fraud. After the UltraGeoPoint integration, Alaska’s audit and review processes were able to flag and investigate potentially fraudulent applications based on out-of-state IP addresses. Ultimately, these processes identified more than 700 fraudulent applications, resulting in eight indictments in state or federal court, 36 civil actions, and the recovery or non-release of approximately $2.6 million.
Future Outlook
Business Roadmap
Neustar plans to strengthen its portfolio with acquisitions. In 2019, the company acquired Verisign’s DDoS and in 2020, it acquired Verisign’s DNS. The company is also set to expand its global channel.
"We are striving to be much more channel oriented to achieve more than 50% of our business through the channel over time. In 2019 we had less than 10% of our sales through the channel. In 2020 we crossed over 20%,” adds Brian.
Product Roadmap:
Neustar plans to strengthen its application security as the applications of DDoS, WAF, Bot, and API management converge into a seamless service to protect networks and applications from all locations. Neustar will build its DNS services capabilities to cover secure connections to integrated firewall and mobile or offnet capabilities for a secure experience from any location or device.
"We will continue to augment our data collections and machine learning systems to build our intelligence while improving privacy by design," adds Brian.
Technology Roadmap
Neustar plans to continue to augment the service platform with enhanced visibility, reporting, unified user experience, expanded API, additional integration points, and automation options. Neustar also plans to expand DNS and Application Security network into new markets and expand application delivery and protection capabilities including web performance management, remote browser isolation, content-caching, and content acceleration, and add new enterprise security functions into the platform including SD-WAN, next-generation firewall, and IDS/IPS.
"Our vision is to be an industry leader in delivering mature, cloud-based, security and network services to demanding customers. We will continue to innovate existing services to keep pace with the changing threat landscape," concludes Brian.