NRB, a leading IT services provider in Belgium and Europe, partnered with NETSCOUT to safeguard the integrity of Belgium’s electoral process, supporting the country’s democratic efforts.
NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, a leading provider of performance management, cybersecurity and DDoS attack protection solutions, has announced its customer NRB, a leading IT services provider in Belgium and Europe, was successful in protecting the integrity of local and provincial elections in Belgium from cyberattacks.
Intelligence available before the October 13 elections showed that pro-Russian groups had targeted several Belgian government sites, including provincial and city sites, with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks after the country expressed support for Ukraine.
NRB mobilised its employees and subsidiaries to ensure a secure electoral process and leveraged its cybersecurity professionals, NETSCOUT’s responsive subject matter experts and DDoS technology, and other best-of-breed technologies to protect Belgium’s democratic process.
“Our teams worked together to anticipate and react to potential threats to deliver optimal service levels to support the elections,” said Antony Gallez, Network Team Manager, NRB Group.
“A major challenge of such a complex project with high stakes is ensuring our cybersecurity specialists have the tools, technology and support they need to continuously monitor the operations. NETSCOUT’s expertise in DDoS mitigation and their responsiveness to our needs were key factors in defining and implementing the most effective countermeasures.”
NRB’s cybersecurity specialists employed NETSCOUT’s Arbor Cloud, a cloud-based managed DDoS protection service, along with Arbor Edge Defense (AED), an on-premises adaptive DDoS protection solution, to perform pre-emptive mitigation in the days before the election.
Working collaboratively, the teams planned and implemented an effective strategy to ensure the security and performance of NRB’s infrastructure during the election.
“Pre-planning and proven, scalable DDoS protection is critical to maintaining network and service availability given the growing sophistication and frequency of DDoS attacks today,” said Darren Anstee, Chief Security Technologist, NETSCOUT.
“NRB’s cybersecurity team worked seamlessly with us to plan an effective strategy to protect the infrastructure supporting this election, using adaptive DDoS protection. Our teams’ focus on this challenge and the strategy and technologies we used to mitigate attacks proved effective in defending Belgium’s electoral process.”
We asked Richard Hummel, Threat Intelligence Lead for NETSCOUT, further questions to find out more.
How does NETSCOUT collaborate with IT providers like NRB to ensure quick response times and readiness for high-stakes events such as national elections?
The first measure we take is proactive. We track the latest DDoS threats and hacktivists and continually deliver near real-time threat intelligence content via our ATLAS Intelligence Feed. This becomes a first line of defence for infrastructure we know the adversaries are using.
From there, we often have methods to further dig into a campaign and can provide background, historical knowledge, and methodology that the adversary uses. In this instance, we were able to co-ordinate with NRB through our Arbor Cloud team to ensure they knew of the Tactics, Techniques, Procedures (TTPs) and the targets for this attack campaign. This enabled the teams to ensure more surgical detection and mitigation of the threats.
What insights did NETSCOUT gain from protecting Belgium’s local and provincial elections that might apply to future electoral events?
While we didn’t gain any new insights, we were able to re-affirm our own assessment. That is, a well-prepared and well-educated enterprise or service provider can and will succeed in the face of a significant threat like NoName057.
What emerging trends in DDoS attack tactics have you observed, and how is NETSCOUT adapting to stay ahead of these evolving threats?
The major trends include automation, resiliency of attacking infrastructure, smarter obfuscation of attacking sources and turn-key solutions for pre-attack reconnaissance and attack for any would-be DDoS attacker. These innovations come in the form of features on DDoS-for-Hire platforms in the digital underground.
