Security attacks on mobile operators increase – European network fortifies, with Cellusys Signalling Firewall
Dublin, 30th March 2015 – Cellusys today announced deployment of its Signalling Firewall in a major European network. The SS7 Firewall gives operators full control over the signalling stack from MTP3 to MAP.
For this European operator it’s a timely addition from the Cellusys family of telecoms products. Threats to mobile networks are growing. Dawood Ghalaieny, CEO at Cellusys: “SS7 Signalling was designed for a very different environment to that of today. In the 1980s, among the small number of mobile telecoms operators – all state-owned, or large corporations – there was a high level of trust. They simply needed a ‘walled garden’. No authentication was built in to SS7.
“But now in 2015, and with 1,000-plus operators globally, it’s easier than ever for companies to get access to the SS7 network. Operators and roaming hubs are selling access at relatively low cost, and some operators have resorted to selling their roaming agreements – so once a company has access in one territory, they have access to the global SS7 network – and all subscribers – worldwide.”
The five critical threats are: tracking, in which attackers pinpoint the geographic location of subscribers. Intercept / Man-in-the-Middle – attackers eavesdrop on calls and SMS. Denial of service – subscribers unable to use the network. Fraud – attackers purport to be subscribers, and consume their credit and service. Spam – unsolicited SMS.
Alan Murphy, CTO at Cellusys: “We’ve developed the firewall off the back of our SMS Defence and Roaming expertise – so that’s 8 years of battle-testing; evolving message parameters and filtering; and refining usability.”
The firewall is a powerful system with fine-grained filtering, so operators can guard against signalling attacks while allowing valid messaging into the network. Reports and alerts are highly detailed. And a flexible pipeline architecture enables new modules to be quickly deployed in order to prevent new types of attacks.
Alan Murphy: “This hole in the security of mobile networks is equivalent to the risks on the Internet in the 1990s – before effective Internet firewalls. Mobile networks are wide open to attackers.”
Clearly mobile operators need tools to monitor and enforce security policies effectively; to block certain request messages and prevent the leaking of information to external entities – to safeguard against these threats. The Cellusys Signalling Firewall provides network operators with complete protection and traffic monitoring. The operator is able to detect and prevent these and other types of attacks.
To discover more about the rising security threats to subscribers and mobile operators worldwide; and about the solution, see cellusys.com/security-solutions/
About Cellusys
For 10 years Cellusys has been building precision technology for mobile networks: roaming solutions and security solutions. The people at Cellusys love technology, and hate red tape. The engineers have end-to-end control – which better enables them to build intuitive, powerful, precise solutions. This means better experiences for subscribers, and more profit for operators.
Contact
Rick Carter, Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing, Cellusys
+1 770 536 2425
PDF: European network fortifies with Cellusys SS7 Firewall
Tags: firewall, map, mtp3, signalling firewall, ss7Categorised in: News