Content Controls
The impact on operators of rogue applications, phishing, and fraud among wireless devices is increasingly serious and, unless controlled, has the potential to cost service providers multi millions of dollars each year in customer care costs, contested revenues, disabled devices, subscriber churn, network over-engineering and brand damage.
It is the unique connection between the mobile device and the subscriber’s wallet that is driving the growth of mobile threats, and it is the criminal financial return for virus-writers and fraudsters that is determining the shape and scale of each attack. It is important to identify the very real differences between fixed-line and mobile threats:
- The ability to generate a financial return means mobile threats are engineered to be stealthy: with low infection rates, and low activity rates so they are difficult to spot within valid traffic
- Mobile attacks will use legitimate connectivity where possible to minimise the risk of detection
- Where possible, mobile threats will be launched from multiple sources, and from legitimate users to reduce the cost of attack as well as reduce detection
- Many mobile threats will minimise user interaction, or use message types that cannot be forwarded or retained to defeat “global feedback” mechanisms
Attacks are therefore highly individualised to avoid detection, easily defeating the standard email anti-spam signature based approaches which rely on mass market spam campaigns and global feedback from users in order to identify new threats.
Mobile devices have the potential to become compromised because of the various vectors for infection; from website downloads, app purchases, Bluetooth, or memory card swapping; operators need to protect their networks by assuming each mobile device is potentially hostile.
The AdaptiveMobile Network+ Protection Platform (NPP+) provides operators with policy-based content control to detect new threats, block their transmission through the network and isolate the sources responsible. NPP+ offers:
- Content Traffic Analysis: network-wide monitoring of all message content to detect similar messages, files, images, URL’s, phone numbers, shortcodes or other calls to action in order to identify new threats
- Adaptive Content Signaturing: both automated in-network and central evaluation of suspicious content, inappropriate images and text, to provide front-line real-time blocking of suspicious and known threats
- Policy-based Reputation: applying granular inspection of subscribers or off-network sources based on their reputation with regards to sending known hostile or inappropriate content
- Device Remediation: identifying and isolating the compromised device to notify the subscriber, and prevent further loss