 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scato-Cutaya here at ITW 2019 in Atlanta. First time here in the city for this event. Excited to be here. Also joining me here today, my friend, Zen Giannis, he's the vice president of sales for Nexus Guard. Zen, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks, Jamie, how are you? Good, good. As many of us know here, Nexus Guard is the premier DDoS mitigator and has been around for a decade, 10 years now. But for those who aren't familiar with Nexus Guard, can you please tell our viewers what makes Nexus Guard unique? Sure, sure. So Nexus Guard is a premier DDoS mitigation platform service. We have nine global scrubbing centers and we've built our own software platform. So it's more of a software as a service type of solution. So it's mostly, I hate the word cloud based, but cloud based solution or network based where we can provide services remotely via network BGP announcements or DNS switches where they just point to us. We can protect websites, we can protect network infrastructure, we can protect DNS. So really what sets us apart is it's really a service. So you don't have to be a DDoS mitigation expert. We can do that for you. Our platform does it for you. We have our SOC that's 24-7. So what we compete against or what's out there in the market that we're different from is most companies go out and they buy a bunch of hardware, they have to train their people, and then they have to wait to see if they get an attack. And by the time one comes, they forget how to do it anyway. So we take all that headache away from them. We have a multi-tenant platform especially for service providers where they can sell to their customers. They can turn it into a value added service and they can actually charge for the service. So it just makes it a lot, it lets them do what they do and let us do what we do, which is the DDoS mitigation. And talking DDoS mitigation, of course cyber crimes on the rise. It's nearly every headline that we're reading these days, very scary stuff here. How does Nexus Guard help companies protect their network assets? Sure. So like I mentioned earlier, there's really three pillars to what we sell. One's the network protection, we call it origin protection. The other's application protection, which is for the websites and everything that you're running on the network. And then the DNS, which is how people find you and if they knock that out then you're offline. The way you protect your assets is basically DDoS is a crime, it's vandalism. They're basically trying to take you offline so you can't serve your customers or your content. So on the network side, we basically keep you up so that, you know, if you're a service provider, one customer doesn't take down many and you don't lose revenue. On the application side, we have a couple different things. One, we protect against the attacks that will knock parts of the site offline. Let's say, for example, if you are an e-commerce site and they took out the link between your shopping cart and your payment gateway, your website's up but you can't cash it any money. The other part of it is we have web allocation firewall built in so we can make sure that credit cards are going in but they're not going out. So these are all ways that you can stop malicious crimes. You know, people try to inject code in there to get in and steal stuff from your database. That's all kind of covered in our solution. And what it does is it makes, depending on who you are, it makes you compliant. So if you're a financial institution, you need certain compliance things. If you're e-commerce, you take credit cards, you need to be PCI compliant. And Nexus Guard's part of that strategy. Well, hearing all those safeguards you guys have in place definitely makes me feel a little bit more at ease on this whole topic. And as a thought leader too, we should mention Nexus Guard really does monitor so many networks out there around the globe and analyzes and creates this data into nice, fabulous, quarterly reports. What type of information is shared and what's your latest reports and trends say? Okay, so we just released our Q1 threat report. And basically what we do is, so since we're protecting so many different networks, we see the attacks they get. So we'll consolidate that, we'll analyze it, and then we'll put out a report to give guidance on what we're seeing. And to give people a preview, in our last report, what we noticed was that a lot of mobile iOS and Android operating systems were giving like a 20% increase in attacks, meaning that we don't know if it's malware or people are jail-breaking their phones or whatever they're doing, but somehow malicious content's getting in and they're utilizing your phone as a botnet to be able to send traffic out. So that's on the rise. So people think, oh, Apple's totally secure? Maybe, maybe not. You could have a bad application, but that's on the rise. The other thing we've been seeing is the types of, the two largest types of attacks that we saw were NTP, which is network time protocol and DNS reflection attacks. And the reason those are so dangerous is because a reflection attack means this. It means you're going to a site that is meant to serve data. So you say, okay, I'd like to, I'd like to, I'm going to ask this site, what is, you know, where does Jamie Scottle live? And it's going to tell me you look it up and then it's going to send it to me. But if I say I'm looking for everybody on the internet, it'll feed that back to me. So I can send one megabit in and 100 megabits will come back. But then I tell it, I'm not me, I'm Jamie Scottle. So it'll send 100 megs at you. So it's a reflection, so it amplifies the attack. Basically it reflects and then amplifies off because it doesn't come back to me. It goes to whoever my target is. So you're basically vandalizing someone else's network to hit somebody else. And from Q4 to Q1, what have you seen? Well, so what we noticed was that the number of attacks doubled in size from Q4 to Q1 this year, which shows an increased trend. And like we said, part of that's the mobile. And part of that is just, you know, we predicted in our previous report that DDoS as a service would be on the rise. And that's showing true to form. I mean, we're just basically thinking that it's now becoming easier. So even though the FBI has been cracking down, trying to stop these dark websites, things like that, they're still finding ways around it. And people, if you want to DDoS somebody, you can get on a tour browser, send some Bitcoin and attack your targets. So it's actually pretty scary. Yes, thank you, Zan, for scaring me even further. I appreciate that. And for those who are also scared at home and want to learn more about Nexus Guard, where can they go? Well, you can go to nexusguard.com. You can go to your site. I'm sure you're going to have some information on our stuff. We're providing a link to the free threat report from wherever this is posted. And then if you want more information, feel free to reach out to us on our website, nexusguard.com, or I think sales at nexusguard. And basically, I mean, what we recommend right now is like, make sure you patch your software. Make sure, you know, don't become part of the botnet. And that's, you know, I always say that my mother is probably DDoS in half the world because she's got so many different malware on her computer because she just can't help herself. And that's what's happening. I mean, your phone now is becoming, phones right now have about 10 gigs of upstream, I mean, 10 to 20 megabits of upstream capacity. Think about that. A thousand of those phones that are compromised just sending traffic at one location, it becomes a big attack. So it's really, people don't even know that they're part of the problem. And that's an issue. Love those tips. Certainly a company to watch and to learn from nexusguard.com. Again, the URL for their latest quarterly report right down below. Go ahead and click on it. Thank you, Zen, for your time and your insight. You teach me every time I talk with you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV here at ITW. Happy networking.