NEWS & EVENTS
Press Releases
American Tower Selects Mazu Networks's Intrusion Protection Solution to Protect Mission-Critical Business Applications
Leading infrastructure provider for the wireless and broadcasting industries uses Mazu Enforcer to protect online real estate management system and key internal applications
Cambridge, Mass (September 8, 2003) - Mazu Networks, a leading provider of enterprise network security solutions, today announced that American Tower Corporation (NYSE: AMT) has selected its Mazu Enforcer solution for network security. American Tower is using the Mazu Enforcer to protect both customer-facing systems and key internal applications and network resources.
American Tower is a leading independent owner, operator and developer of wireless communications towers. The company currently owns and operates approximately 15,000 communication sites in the United States, Mexico and Brazil. American Tower leases tower antenna space to its many wireless and broadcast customers and offers solutions such as site management, site development, construction and installation services.
Taking a phased approach, American Tower first implemented the Enforcer to protect the company's centrally managed, Internet-based real estate management system. The system is business-critical for the company because it serves as the main communication conduit through which marketing and sales staff share site information on their tower and antenna locations with customers and prospects. American Tower also uses the online real estate management system to monitor site status and to exchange important information with technical and operational staff members, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Like most other corporations and enterprises that maintain mission-critical, externally-facing Web sites and online resources, American Tower had experienced a variety of cyber attacks against its real estate system. Distributed denial of service attacks were particularly troublesome, due to the difficulty experienced in stopping these types of attacks.
"The attacks on our public website were consuming large amounts of network resources as well as occupying several hours per week of our security engineers's time," said Eric Wassell, director of IT operations for American Tower. "We wanted an intelligent, proactive solution that would enable us to identify these attacks -- even the new, unknown ones -- and quickly take the right actions to mitigate them. We chose the Mazu Enforcer because it gives us the maximum level of protection against any unanticipated attack."
"Mazu is pleased and proud to win American Tower as a customer," said Jim Melvin, president and CEO of Mazu Networks. "They are a real leader in their market, and are definitely setting the pace for technological innovation. We look forward to helping them to continue to achieve their business objectives by maintaining the availability of their important online resources and business processes."
In the second phase of the implementation, American Tower deployed the Mazu Enforcer on the companyfs core network to protect against internal attacks. Company analysis showed that internal attacks began to occur after employees who brought their laptops home infected them by plugging them into their cable modems. Not realizing their machines were infected, they would then bring their laptops back onto the corporate network, causing the internal attacks. American Tower deployed an additional
About Mazu Networks, Inc.
Mazu Networks delivers behavioral threat protection solutions that help corporations and government entities secure their business-critical services, processes and data. Mazu's self-optimizing security solutions maintain the availability of key network assets, lowering business risk and avoiding downtime and lost revenue. Mazu solutions use advanced network traffic modeling to combat internal and external system threats. Mazu is backed by premier venture capital firms, including Greylock, Matrix Partners, Pilot House Ventures Group and Benchmark Capital. Mazu is an IBM Business Partner. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Mazu also maintains locations in New York and London. For more information, please visit www.mazunetworks.com or contact the company at www.mazunetworks.com/contact.