Here’s How One Airline Upgraded Its Security in the Cloud

Founded over 70 years ago, this airline is now one of the largest in South America.
Business started with domestic flights but has since expanded to an array of international destinations with service to cities across the United States, Canada and Latin America.

The airline conducts the majority of its business via its e-commerce website and sponsors a frequent flyer loyalty program. Until a few years ago, it managed its applications on-premise before transitioning them to Amazon AWS and adding new functionality to improve the customer experience. AWS provided out-of-the-box web application firewall (WAF) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack protection for the airline’s external sites and Imperva WAF protection for internal applications.

Challenge

The airline experienced a massive Brute Force attack targeting its loyalty program website. The attackers attempted to gain unauthorized access, resulting in a denial-of-service attack to the login page. The airline did not have visibility into the attack with their existing application security solutions and needed a new WAF and DDoS solution implemented immediately to secure their website and applications.

Solution

The airline engaged with Radware, which proposed its fully-managed Cloud WAF Service and Cloud DDoS Protection Service. The proof-of-concept allayed initial customer concerns that adding new cloud-based security services to their network would increase network latency. The airline was pleased that neither Radware service added latency, but rather improved application performance by preventing malicious attacks (including attacks listed in the OWASP Top 10) and freeing application resources for legitimate traffic.

The airline also leverages Radware’s Emergency Response Team premium service for immediate assistance and mitigation when there is a security emergency. The network security team receives real-time assistance during attacks, as well as threat intelligence, signature updates and customized proactive consultation, providing a perfect complement to the airline’s in-house expertise.

The following year, the airline experienced an increase in sophisticated bot attacks originating from unknown accounts on the airline’s portal, so the Cloud WAF Service was upgraded with device fingerprinting to identify genuine vs. malicious devices.

As a result, the airline has reduced its total cost of ownership. In addition, it improved the customer experience because its applications and networks operate more efficiently because they no longer handle malicious traffic. What’s more, the airline’s security team can use its resources for other priorities while Radware fully manages their WAF and DDoS security solutions.