IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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Bringing security to the next-level of networking
Tue, 11th Dec 2018
FYI, this story is more than a year old

When it comes to cyber crime, you may have heard that Australia is now the second most targeted country in Asia and the eighth most targeted in the world.

Meanwhile, New Zealand is quickly becoming infamous for its ‘she'll be right' attitude toward cybersecurity and is notoriously slow at detecting when things do go wrong.

“Australia and New Zealand have booming, healthy economies and are early adopters of cloud services - that means more potential attack points, rather than safety behind a traditional perimeter firewall,” says Infoblox ANZ and ASEAN managing director Ken Pohniman.

“Companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the best perimeter defence via traditional firewall companies, which means that one of the most vulnerable parts of most networks now is DNS.

DNS, or the domain name system, is part of the next-level networking system that keeps the internet, and every service that uses it, alive. This system is collectively known as DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IP address management.)

To secure the next-level network, you need next-level security.

As the market leader in all things DDI, with over 50% of the global market, Infoblox knows a thing or two about keeping your network protected at the highest level.

“If you get malware on your network - and that's usually a ‘when', not an ‘if' - once it gains access, the next step is to get the data out. Here, we can help in two ways.

“One is our threat intelligence about all these bad domain names, we can block them at a DNS level - if the malware can never find the IP address of that server, the malware can't contact its command and control centre, that's what we call a DNS firewall.

“The next is that we can prevent exfiltration of data via DNS. The very first sign of bad things happening on the network is a DNS query, it's the only way they get out. We are that DNS server, so we can help filter that and we notify other security systems. We are managing DNS queries and we're managing the IP addresses, so we see everything that's going on in a network. That's incredibly valuable information to other security systems like vulnerability scanners.

Whatever data you need to keep secure - and with the advent of more and more stringent privacy and breach legislation across the globe you do need to keep it secure - Infoblox can act as a line of defence in an area that is being exploited at an increasing rate.

With the growth of the hyper-connected world, SD-WAN, cloud-based platforms and IoT, the need for Next-Level Security which sits at a point above it all is more pressing than ever.

“With IoT, one of the key aspects around security is visibility, knowing who is doing what and where they're doing it. A company's security expert can't see every IoT device employees are bringing in - this is what we call ‘Shadow IoT',” explains Pohniman.

“The beauty of the Infoblox solution is that we operate in the control plane and at the DNS level, and every single device in your network - smartwatch, phone, light bulb, refrigerator - is connected to the internet and so needs to use DNS to get to the outside world. That gives us this unique ability to have full visibility of what is in the network and who, or what, is talking to who.

Click here to find out if your network is secure at the core to prevent attacks and plug vulnerabilities across the spectrum.