[Survey] Is Your Connectivity Provider Your Weakest Security Link?

Enterprises increasingly rely on the Internet, from online services and customer support to storing digital assets and information in the cloud. All that data must move across the Internet without being intercepted, changed, redirected, or blocked.

Your business may be susceptible to these risks if your connectivity providers and cloud and CDN providers are not actively mitigating them with proper routing security best practices.

Over the last 12 months, there were almost 3,000 major attacks on the global Internet transport and routing systems. These incidents, called ‘route hijacks’ and ‘route leaks’, result in:

• Traffic being dropped.
• Unauthorized inspection of traffic.
• Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
• A serious strain on infrastructure.

Over 70,000 independent networks interconnect with each other to create the Internet. Your connectivity cloud and CDN providers are part of this vast infrastructure, and each has a role in securing the whole. But this activity is not regulated by any government or central authority. Therefore, choosing connectivity providers that take routing security seriously is the most important line of defense against these incidents.

MANRS+ is a proposed certification framework for connectivity providers that comply with stringent traffic security and auditing requirements, which is currently under active development. MANRS+ is aimed at helping organizations identify which connectivity and cloud providers comply with current routing security best practices as set out by MANRS.

By choosing providers that are MANRS+ certified provides you with a high assurance quality mark that they comply with:

• Stronger and more detailed requirements enforcing best practices in traffic security, mitigating a broader set of risks related to routing and traffic security.
• Higher levels of auditing to assure that they conform to these requirements.
• Extended requirements with more focus on customer demands.

To maximize the value proposition of MANRS+ to enterprises, we are asking public and private organizations to please take a short survey to evaluate the requirements for your connectivity providers.

For more information and updates, check out the MANRS+ Steering Group.