2006 FIFA World Cup Germany(TM) Converged Communication Network Scores by Withstanding Two Months of Relentless Hacker Attacks Yet Still Reaches Goal20 July 2006
Despite more than five million unique firewall events that occurred each day -- including 128,000 that made it past the network firewalls -- not a single security- related or application outage occurred from May 15 to July 9, on the world's largest converged communication network built by Avaya Inc. (NYSE: AV) for the 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany(TM).
The converged network Avaya built for FIFA handled more than 21 trillion bytes of voice and data traffic -- including players' and journalists' accreditations, photo transmissions and match details sent around the world in real time and ultimately transmitted to millions of stadium spectators and fans worldwide. Avaya, a leading global provider of business applications, systems and services, is an official partner of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
Security consultants from the Avaya Network Management team at the 2006 FIFA World Cup event removed 70-80 viruses/Trojans/malware during the event. These included a number of widespread malware that are currently circulating in the world, such as W32/Mydoom.M@mm, Net-worm.Win32.Mytob. All of the worms, viruses or Trojan incidents were brought into the network on laptops that were already infected. All of these malware were all detected and removed before the laptops were allowed to connect to the system.
Key to ensuring the security of the converged communication network for the FIFA World Cup was a world class Network IDS System (NIDS) called Sentarus that was provided to Avaya by Demarc Security. The NIDS detected in real- time, attempted attacks by hackers, malware, worms and viruses on the FIFA IT solution infrastructure. The NIDS analyzed and correlated data in real-time, and used both open-source and Avaya Labs tools to analyze network attacks, and to quickly rectify any potential problems.
Network security monitoring began on May 15. Over the next two months, approximately 128,000 security events were recorded by the sensors located in sixteen venues throughout Germany. Approximately 12% of these events were rated as "critical", and were subjected to further analysis. The overwhelming majority of these events were false positives -- as determined by security analysts' whose task it was to analyze whether recorded events were real or not.
In addition, the Avaya team used a number of other tools to enhance and extend security monitoring and response capabilities. These included: HIDS (Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems) console (ISS RealSecure - SiteProtector), Antivirus management console (McAfee Antivirus & ePolicy Orchestrator), Proxy management console (Microsoft ISA server), Firewall syslog data parsing tools, and IP-based Video surveillance in all technical areas.
One of the main security goals was to help ensure that viruses or worms did not slow down critical applications traffic and ongoing log analyses showed that no Denial of Service or attacks took place. "From a security standpoint, we never lost bandwidth or network resources due to resource exhaustion," explained Dr. Tom Porter, head of IT security for the FIFA World Cup network for Avaya. "Providing highly reliable, secure, communications solutions is what we do every day for customers around the world. This event was no different and it paid off for FIFA, the teams, players, journalists and spectators alike. The communications network from Avaya operated flawlessly because we planned, prepared, and put a team of highly skilled Avaya networking and security experts in place," added Porter.
About Avaya
Avaya Inc. designs, builds and manages communications networks for more than 1 million businesses worldwide, including over 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500(R). Focused on businesses large to small, Avaya is a world leader in secure and reliable Internet protocol (IP) telephony systems and communications software applications and services.
Driving the convergence of voice and data communications with business applications -- and distinguished by comprehensive worldwide services -- Avaya helps customers leverage existing and new networks to achieve superior business results. For more information visit the Avaya website: http://www.avaya.com.
About the FIFA World Cup and Avaya
As the Official Convergence Communication provider for the 2006 FIFA World Cup(TM), Avaya is providing a champion communications network infrastructure for the World's largest sporting event. The converged network -- that combines voice and data on the same infrastructure -- will connect the 12 FIFA World Cup stadiums, the media centers in all stadiums and the FIFA headquarters in Berlin. Players, coaches, volunteers and fans alike will benefit from the Avaya network that will be instrumental in player and journalist accreditation, results reporting, material tracking, accommodation confirmations, transportation, and ticketing, among other critical functions. With an estimated 45,000 network connections, 30,000 network devices and over 15 terabytes (or 15,000,000,000 bytes) of data, it is the largest converged communication network ever built for a sporting event.
Source: prnewswire
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