Secure, Efficient, Reliable, and Resilient Military Communications

Best-In-Class Application Threat Intelligence Protects Email And Office 365tm On Cloud 

This federal agency has a critical and sensitive mission: they are responsible for implementing the defense policy established by the government across multiple lines of armed services. The organization is chartered with protection of the country at home and abroad, working with allies and partners wherever possible.

Their aim is to ensure the armed forces have the training, equipment and support necessary for their work, all within a prescribed budget. Responsible for mounting a cyber-defense across all military organizations in the country, they worked with Keysight to target specific application traffic, conversation endpoints and bandwidth consumed. This metadata had to be forwarded to security “sensors” for long term storage and analysis.

In addition, like many organizations today, they were concerned about possible security threats contained in emails going to and from their defense partners. Through their Service Provider, they sought a “Gateway Service” to monitor and protect these communications.

Finally, the agency wanted visibility into encrypted traffic and applications that were being run over non-standard ports where attackers were attempting to evade security countermeasures. An example of this is SSH running over the port used by SSL. Secure, efficient, reliable and resilient communications were needed.

The agency wanted visibility into encrypted traffic and applications that were being run over non-standard ports where attackers attempted to evade security countermeasures

Company:

National Defense Agency Chartered with protection of a country, including cyber-defense across all military organizations within the country

Key issues:

•This federal agency sought heightened security on communications external and internal to the agency and their defense partners.

•The customer wanted a “Gateway Service” providing inline security between the agency and emails to/ from external partners 

•They sought to specifically monitor traffic over “non-standard” ports, alerting them to possible security threats 

•With multiple Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools and Intrusion Prevention and Detection (IPS/IDS) vendors, they needed a network packet broker and solution that scaled across all platforms 

Solutions:

•(3) Network Packet Brokers (NPB) with AppStack featuring IxFlow™ 

•Subsequently, added (2) more NPBs with AppStack.

Results:

•Secure, efficient, reliable and resilient military communications 

•No training time required 

•Email with external defense partners and Office 365, hosted on the Cloud, was secured.

Keysight’s AppStack Delivers Actionable, Application-Level Insight  For Agency Use

The agency’s Service Provider approached the Keysight team with an explanation of these issues, addressed directly by the advanced intelligence and visibility offered by Keysight’s NTO 6212, the AppStack platform. Keysight’s AppStack scales across multiple vendor products, filtering network traffic to provide rich data on application behavior and the location of users to a variety of tools used by the agency, including data loss prevention tools, malware prevention and threat detection. It easily identifies unknown network applications, mitigates security threats, and identifies trends in application usage.