Dublin, 30th March 2015 – Cellusys today announced deployment of its Signalling Firewall in a major European network. The SS7 Firewall gives operators full control over the signalling stack from MTP3 to MAP.
For this European operator it’s a timely addition from the Cellusys family of telecoms products. Threats to mobile networks are growing. Dawood Ghalaieny, CEO at Cellusys: “SS7 Signalling was designed for a very different environment to that of today. In the 1980s, among the small number of mobile telecoms operators – all state-owned, or large corporations – there was a high level of trust. They simply needed a ‘walled garden’. No authentication was built in to SS7.
“But now in 2015, and with 1,000-plus operators globally, it’s easier than ever for companies to get access to the SS7 network. Operators and roaming hubs are selling access at relatively low cost, and some operators have resorted to selling their roaming agreements – so once a company has access in one territory, they have access to the global SS7 network – and all subscribers – worldwide.”
The five critical threats are: tracking, in which attackers pinpoint the geographic location of subscribers. Intercept / Man-in-the-Middle – attackers eavesdrop on calls and SMS. Denial of service – subscribers unable to use the network. Fraud – attackers purport to be subscribers, and consume their credit and service. Spam – unsolicited SMS.
Alan Murphy, CTO at Cellusys: “We’ve developed the firewall off the back of our SMS Defence and Roaming expertise – so that’s 8 years of battle-testing; evolving message parameters and filtering; and refining usability.”
The firewall is a powerful system with fine-grained filtering, so operators can guard against signalling attacks while allowing valid messaging into the network. Reports and alerts are highly detailed. And a flexible pipeline architecture enables new modules to be quickly deployed in order to prevent new types of attacks.
Alan Murphy: “This hole in the security of mobile networks is equivalent to the risks on the Internet in the 1990s – before effective Internet firewalls. Mobile networks are wide open to attackers.”
Clearly mobile operators need tools to monitor and enforce security policies effectively; to block certain request messages and prevent the leaking of information to external entities – to safeguard against these threats. The Cellusys Signalling Firewall provides network operators with complete protection and traffic monitoring. The operator is able to detect and prevent these and other types of attacks.
To discover more about the rising security threats to subscribers and mobile operators worldwide; and about the solution, see cellusys.com/security-solutions/
About Cellusys
For 10 years Cellusys has been building precision technology for mobile networks: roaming solutions and security solutions. The people at Cellusys love technology, and hate red tape. The engineers have end-to-end control – which better enables them to build intuitive, powerful, precise solutions. This means better experiences for subscribers, and more profit for operators.
Contact
Rick Carter, Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing, Cellusys
+1 770 536 2425
When National Mobile Roaming becomes a conflict of Interest
Mobile Operators are constantly looking to enhance their network coverage in order to attract more subscribers and increase customer satisfaction. These enhancements, however, can be both time consuming and costly pushing Operators towards National Roaming Partner agreements in order to provide better network coverage. By having these agreements in place, Operators are able to provide service to their subscribers in geographic areas they currently cannot reach or are commercially impractical.
Although this can be a beneficial solution for mobile operators, it can cause a conflict of interest in some of their serving areas. Described below is a challenge that one of our clients faced recently and requested Cellusys to implement a solution for this problem:
Our client is a major operator in a large country, which has put in place multiple national roaming agreements with other national operators in order to provide better network coverage to its subscribers.
They noticed that their national roaming partners were expanding their network coverage to overlap their home network coverage area either by adding more base stations or increasing transmission power. This greatly increased the chance of their subscribers registering on the roaming partner’s network even when they are in the home network coverage area. This has resulted in millions of dollars in lost revenue every month to our client.
National roaming agreements tend to be revenue share by nature and require great attention by the home operator on controlling their subscriber roaming activities. Failing to pay attention to this can cause the home operator to face significant revenue losses while their national roaming partners profit significantly.
Basically operators need to control their subscribers roaming activities when moving around following coverage areas.
- Home Network Coverage Area Only
- Home/Roaming Partner Coverage Area
- Roaming Partner Coverage Area Only
Operators can successfully achieve this by incorporating the Cellusys National Steering System into their network which prevents subscribers from registering on the national roaming partner’s network where there is coverage overlap and re-directing them to the home network when the home network becomes available again. In a nutshell Cellusys National Steering enables the home operator to gain control of their subscribers when roaming in partner’s network coverage to ensure that the national roaming partners are only utilised where needed.
Cellusys has implemented National steering successfully for several operators worldwide to help them visualise their national roaming landscape and minimise revenue loss to their national roaming partners.
Security is becoming increasingly important to mobile network operators. With more and more threats appearing each day, it is critical to implement security measures within a network to protect both revenue and subscribers.
Today we’ve published an overview of SS7 Security and TCAP Handshaking on our website. Cellusys are aware of the challenges that face operators and have implemented highly scalable SMS firewall and SMS router solutions to help secure your network. To find out more about Cellusys’ SMS firewall and router solutions, visit our Security Solutions page.