Corero Network Security PLC (LON:CNS) President Andrew Lloyd caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their first SmartWall win in Australia, why this marketplace is of interest to them and how they track the rampant growth of commercial and industrial cybercrime
Q1: This morning we saw the announcement of your first SmartWall customer in Australia, could you explain to us the type of business these digital enterprises are and why they’re buying from Corero Network Security?
A1: Digital enterprises for us really fall into two types of organisation, they can be both government services and, what you would recognise as, companies. Some of them are purely online, so a good example of that would be a business-to-business software as a service company whether they’re delivering customer relationship management, whether they’re delivering some other paid-for subscription, their users, not unreasonably, expect them to be online all of the time.
The other type of digital enterprise is perhaps more a traditional business but very typically one that’s gone under a so-called digital transformation. So, it relies very heavily on the communication medium of the internet in order to connect global locations, in order to join up cross-location and in many cases, cross-business processes, that without the internet being online all the time quite simply their businesses would grind to a halt.
So, all of these digital enterprises heavily rely on being online all of the time, the reason that they are buying from Corero is that we help to do just that, even when they’re under a DDoS cyber security attack, we enable them to stay open for business.
Q2: This is your first reported win in Australia, why is this marketplace of interest to you?
A2: You’re right, this is the first one we’ve reported so this one is part of a global roll-out from a company headquartered elsewhere. Australia though has a very healthy retail market, a lot of global brands that have a significant presence there but a lot a lot of indigenous brands, they rely very heavily on trading online, relatively healthy banking sector as well. Another niche where we have developed some specific expertise is online gaming and again, in order to both service the users in that part of the world but also there is an indigenous games market there as well.
So, retail, banking, gaming along with more traditional service provider and hosting providers make for a very fertile market for us. Also, relatively straightforward one for us to do business in given the general culture and contractual frameworks that exist in Australia, their similarities to major markets elsewhere in the world so we look forward to making further progress there in the months and quarters ahead.
Q3: You mention the rampant growth of commercial and industrial cybercrime, what can you tell us about the data that you’ve used?
A3: So, Corero Network Security track almost all of our devices almost all the time. So, it means we have a finger quite literally on the pulse of what’s going on in the DDoS world and trends have been relatively consistent in that almost every indicator is going upwards and to the right.
So, to give you some specific numbers on it, what we continue to see is that relatively short duration, and by that we mean less than 10 minutes, relatively small amplitude of attack, again on the amplitude scale anything less than 1gb per second we would count as a small-scale attack, those continue to dominate. That said, the total number of attacks is up year-over-year by more than 50% so fairly steadily compounding at 10%-20% every quarter, in addition, the largest of the attacks are up by over 50% as well so attacks greater than 10gb per second are up year-over-year, up over 50%.
So, there’s a lot of it about and part of our mission is actually to try and eliminate these attacks and until we can eliminate them, put the protection in place, what we call the real-time DDoS mitigation protection, so that our customers as I’ve said alre3ady today, can stay open for business during an attack.
