Ensuring Gold Medal Connections at the Summer Games

The 2024 Summer Games is among the largest events in the world, with everyone from home viewers to businesses, industries, and entire nations having interest and involvement. Each audience segment will depend on connectivity throughout the games. With a stage that large, bad actors with anything from a personal grudge to national sponsorship will inevitably try to disrupt whatever they can. With the eyes of the world on them, one of France’s largest internet service providers (ISPs) has strengthened its protections of Domain Name System (DNS) services and adjacent infrastructure to stop attacks.

In today’s completely interconnected world, an event the size of the Paris Summer Games necessitates connectivity and service availability, with users, businesses, and even industries across the globe depending on connectivity. This is a scale that even the largest service providers need to plan for. Any outages experienced during an attack could have broad-ranging implications for the service provider, because individual users, businesses, international organizations, and countries all have interests in the event. Ensuring service availability is critical.

Going for Gold with NETSCOUT

As the French ISP started looking for a solution that would provide distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) coverage to critical services, it turned to NETSCOUT due to a previous trusted relationship and because NETSCOUT Arbor Edge Defense (AED) complements existing Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System (TMS) solutions with localized, bidirectional service protection for critical services such as authoritative DNS.

This ISP began by focusing on protecting its services via positioning Arbor DDoS protection in front of the DNS ecosystem but also was able to realize additional protections covering adjacent infrastructure such as load balancers and firewalls—both of which are susceptible to outages during a DDoS attack.

We proposed a solution that brought broader, more sophisticated attack mitigation at the edge of the network and protects many services and devices, eliminating the cost of point solutions such as DNS-specific firewalls. This investment allows the ISP to expand its protections to include additional critical services, as well as protect managed DNS services for its customers.

The ISP deployed AED inline, protecting an environment of load balancers, stateful firewalls, and applications with the initial goal of ensuring DNS resilience during any attacks.

At the outset, this solution is intended to protect DNS services, but ultimately it provides comprehensive service protection for a much larger environment of physical infrastructure and critical business services.

The Winning Team

With NETSCOUT’s long history of industry-leading DDoS detection and mitigation combined with a great working relationship with the ISP, selecting AED as a means to protect critical infrastructure and services from attack was an easy choice. By protecting environments and not just individual services, AED alleviates the inherent vulnerability of stateful devices and removes the need for application-specific solutions such as DNS firewalls, allowing for more unified management—as well as cost savings.

Read the full case study here.