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March 3, 2015

Argyle Data and Gigamon Partner

Gigamon Inc., the leader in traffic visibility solutions with its innovative Unified Visibility Fabric, and Argyle Data, the leader in real-time fraud detection and analytics for data-driven Hadoop organizations in mobile communications and financial services, today announced that the companies are teaming together to deliver fraud detection and revenue protection for communications service providers (CSPs).

According to the Communications Fraud Control Association’s 2013 Global Fraud Loss Survey, an estimated $46.3 billion annually is lost to fraud, and fraud losses are “growing at a faster pace than global telecom revenues.” The high priority fraud types and methods that cost most to CSPs include roaming fraud, subscription fraud, PBX hacking, VoIP hacking and Wangiri fraud.

To address these issues, Argyle Data and Gigamon have teamed up to give CSPs a unique solution that offers fraud detection and revenue protection. This gives CSPs the ability to quickly and effectively respond to fraud while ensuring operational stability and performance of the operational network. Easy to use, the solution also enables pervasive traffic visibility of entire network infrastructures and real-time subscriber level insights.

“We are excited to be teaming with Gigamon to provide a modern way to beat mobile fraud and once again give CSPs the upper hand against criminals,” said Dr. Ian Howells, CMO, Argyle Data. “The combination of Gigamon and Argyle Data allows CSPs to protect both their bottom line and their brand while ensuring the stability and performance of the operational network. Real-time packet level insight is critical in the move from batch to instant response against continually changing advanced attacks.”

Using Network Visibility and Monitoring to Eliminate Carrier Fraud – How the Solution Works

By using the Argyle Data and Gigamon solution, carriers can leverage several services to gain deep insight of subscribers and content, which enables CSPs to optimize, visualize, extract and react to user behavior.

First, user and data plane correlation is achieved by the deployment of Gigamon’s GTP correlation GigaSMART application.  GPRS Tunneling Protocol is (GTP) is commonly used to carry mobile data across networks, and includes control plane and user data plane traffic. Visibility into a subscriber’s activity requires the ability to understand the stateful nature of GTP traffic and correlate subscriber-specific session to gain an accurate view of the subscriber’s activities.

Second, Gigamon’s patented Flow Mapping technology helps reduce traffic and improve analyzer performance. Flow Mapping is a technology found in Gigamon’s GigaVUE Visibility Fabric nodes that takes line-rate traffic at 1Gb, 10Gb, 40Gb or 100Gb from a network tap or a SPAN/mirror port (physical or virtual) and then optimizes flows based on individual traffic profiles of tools and applications that secure, monitor, and analyze the CSP infrastructure.

Next, Gigamon’s FlowVUE application offers a subscriber-based IP sampling solution that helps carriers turn Big Data into manageable and actionable data.  The application enables existing tools to connect to the latest high-speed pipes by providing a representative view of traffic for diagnostics and visualization.

Lastly, GigaSMART provides Adaptive Packet Filtering, which provides a powerful filtering engine that identifies content across any part of a packet, including packet payloads.  Adaptive Packet Filtering enables filtering based on specific encapsulation protocol parameters, including GTP tunnel ID, VXLAN ID, VN-Tag src/dst vif, and many more, including SSL traffic.  In addition, operators also have the capability to look beyond the encapsulation protocols and into the original, encapsulated packet, to filter source/destination IP or Layer 4 port numbers.

Argyle Data then uses Hadoop to quickly process petabytes of data, including real-time packet based data extracted by Gigamon. Argyle Data’s machine learning algorithms and complex analytics are able to detect fraud in real-time from the massive amount of fast-moving data.

“Cybercriminals continue to innovate and find new ways to steal from carriers,” said Andy Huckridge, Director of Service Provider Solutions at Gigamon. “The only way to stop these thefts is to leverage pervasive visibility coupled with real-time big data analytics. With Argyle Data and Gigamon, CSPs gain a dynamic, real-time fraud detecting, visibility fabric for their networks.”

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