Security News > 2020 > April > Attacking the Organism: Telecom Service Providers
Service providers and telecom carriers form the backbone of communications and commerce in modern economies.
Data from F5 Labs shows that over the past few years DDoS and brute force attacks are the most common vectors for the service provider industry, both when the customer was the ultimate target and when the service provider was.
Denial-of-service attacks against service providers generally focus on services and apps or the IT infrastructure itself, attempting to drown the bandwidth and take down the network, or to target more customers.
In each of these cases, it can be difficult for the service provider to discover the attack until a service has gone down or calls start coming in, especially in cases of account takeovers.
So how does the industry defend this colossal expanded organism? Since many of these attacks are masked as a spike in traffic or a general outage, service providers must be equipped to analyze unusual traffic against expected conditions, and then identify all the junk queries in their network service logs.