Fawry, the leading company in electronic payment solutions and digital financial services in Egypt, has confirmed the efficiency and security of its electronic defences across all its platforms and all the services it provides electronically and has denied reports of cyber attacks on its systems. “There is no validity to any rumours circulating on social media pages claiming that Fawry has been subjected to attacks or information system breaches,” the company said in a statement.

A few hours ago, @falconfeeds.io, an X (formerly Twitter) handle that tracks cyber attacks had posted that Fawry was possibly a victim of ransomware as seen below:

LockBit #ransomware group has added 2 new victim to their #darkweb portal.

– Amber Hill Group🇨🇳
– Fawry 🇪🇬#China #Egypt #lockbit #databreach #cyberattack pic.twitter.com/LP9yFJJ12w

— FalconFeeds.io (@FalconFeedsio) November 8, 2023

At the time of publishing this news article, Fawry’s website was still offline.

In response to these claims, Fawry released a statement saying, “The company immediately conducted an investigation into its servers and live broadcast. Based on the tests conducted by the company, it has been found that the servers serving customers and banks have not been subjected to any breaches. The company also confirms that no financial or banking data of customers has been leaked. Furthermore, the company asserts that it adheres to the highest standards of cybersecurity in accordance with the requirements of global regulatory authorities.”

F5 is set to highlight a series of new solutions at GITEX Global 2023. Key developments in the spotlight include new multi-cloud networking (MCN) capabilities that extend application and security services across one or more public clouds, hybrid deployments, native Kubernetes environments, and edge sites.

The solutions represent the next evolutionary step for the F5 Distributed Cloud Services platform, which enables customers to easily integrate network operations, application performance optimization and troubleshooting, and visibility through a single management console.

The new offerings include Distributed Cloud App Connect, which provides an integrated stack approach through a single console to combine comprehensive app networking with full app security, faster provisioning, and ease of use. In addition, Distributed Cloud Network Connect makes it highly secure and simple to deploy connectivity across cloud locations and cloud providers.

The solutions come hot on the heels of F5’s 2023 State of Application Strategy (SOAS) report, which found that 85% of organizations operate distributed application deployments, spanning traditional and modern architectures and multiple hosting environments. “Distributed deployments add operational complexity and cost, obscure visibility, and increase the surface area for potential cyberattacks,” said Mohammed Abukhater, RVP for META at F5. “F5 can now deliver a platform-based approach that is cloud-agnostic and purpose-built to meet the needs of traditional and modern apps—all without increasing complexity or losing granular control and necessary visibility.”

F5 will also showcase its latest security capabilities, including new machine learning enhancements to provide F5’s cloud security portfolio with advanced API endpoint discovery, anomaly detection, telemetry, and behavioural analysis. “F5 customers can now strengthen their security posture with a continuously improving analysis engine and unified policy enforcement. These capabilities enable secure app-to-app communications through validated and monitored APIs, thereby reducing the time security teams spend correcting false positives and accelerating time-to-deployment for new services,” the company said.

Highlights include:

• Enhanced API Security Provides Greater Protection for Modern Apps. F5 delivers API auto-discovery, policy enforcement, and anomaly detection as part of a unified WAAP service, simplifying operations and enforcement through a single console for both app and API protection. Since static signature-based controls are insufficient for protecting API endpoints due to their dynamic, evolving nature, F5 Distributed Cloud API Security utilizes optimized machine learning for automatic API discovery, threat detection, and schema enforcement.
• AI as an Essential Element of App Security. F5 has introduced AI-driven web application firewall (WAF) capabilities, including unique malicious user detection and mitigation capabilities that create a per-user threat score based on behavioural analysis that determines intent. This enables security operations to choose between alerting or automatic blocking to mitigate an attack that would otherwise go undetected by static signatures. All traffic is monitored and proactive defences are applied based on malicious user behaviour that can be correlated across Distributed Cloud WAAP deployments. The new functionality also provides false positive suppression, making it easier to block bad traffic without accidentally blocking legitimate users, and streamlines operations by reducing the time necessary to enable specific app protections.

F5 is expanding its managed service offerings via:

• • Distributed Cloud WAAP Managed Services, enabling F5 customers to access the experience and expertise of the F5 SOC to manage WAF, bot defence, and DDoS protection. Through a shared console, customers have the ability to seamlessly move between a self-service or managed service model as the needs of their apps and approach to app security change.

• • Distributed Cloud Managed Service Portal, enabling F5 service provider partners to build and tailor their own managed service offerings based on the leading security capabilities of F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP. This approach lets partners manage Distributed Cloud WAAP on behalf of their customers without sacrificing visibility, resulting in new revenue sources and value-added services while extending the overall reach of the solution.

“F5 is increasingly standing out for its ability to secure apps in a multi-cloud environment,” said Abukhater. “On the one hand, you have networking players that have multi-cloud capabilities, but they don’t have security. Then you have security players that have capabilities in SaaS and in the cloud, but they are not multi-cloud. To get their security capabilities, you have to put your apps in their walled garden, which is not sufficient either because apps are more and more distributed to ensure the best performance. Digital services that don’t meet the expectations of end-users cost companies millions of dollars in lost sales. F5 was built to solve this problem.”

In other news set to inform the GITEX agenda, F5 NGINX has announced a new subscription option that adds enterprise-level capabilities and support to the hugely popular NGINX Open Source web server, which currently powers over 400 million websites. The Open Source Subscription is a bundle that includes enterprise support to navigate regulatory requirements, enterprise features to address a wide range of traffic management and identity use cases, as well as fleet management for risk reduction via simplified NGINX administration.

“NGINX Open Source is known as the developer’s Swiss army knife,” added Abukhater. “Whether you need a web server, reverse proxy, API gateway, Ingress controller, or cache, NGINX has you covered. However, there was one thing NGINX Open Source users kept telling us was needed: enterprise support. This is why we expect our subscription option to have a big and immediate impact across the world.”

SonicWall is emphasizing the return of customer choice for securing and scaling a mix of cloud, hybrid and traditional environments. “Too many times organizations have been forced to change the way they operate in order to secure access to their networks, data, devices, and people,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “We’ve been busy innovating cloud and virtual solutions that help organizations secure complex blends of networks, including virtual, hybrid, cloud, and on-premises deployments.”

Cybersecurity approach to returning deployment choices to the customer while solving real-world use cases faced by SMBs, enterprises, governments, and MSSPs. SonicWall’s core cloud solution offerings:

• Solve security and connectivity challenges for cloud-native and hybrid environments.
• Secure access to cloud and on-premises applications and virtualized workloads through modern zero-trust capabilities.
• Protect increasingly distributed and remote workforces through powerful virtualized security layers and zero-touch capabilities.
• Simplify threat detection and response by unifying security events and analytics in a single cloud-based dashboard, allowing easy visualization and management of high-risk alerts.

“The modern IT environment is rife with complexity that drives security and connectivity challenges, which can be further complicated when organizations require hybrid environments comprised of physical, virtual, and SaaS offerings, and private and public cloud solutions,” said IDC Research Director Chris Rodriguez. “Cybersecurity vendors that support these deployment options add tremendous financial and operational flexibility for their customers, and are also well suited for organizations that are in different stages of their cloud journey.”

SonicWall’s cloud innovation is driven by the need to solve complex security and connectivity challenges by delivering power, flexibility, and choice to customers and partners. SonicWall has collaborated with organizations worldwide to build some of the most secure and robust hybrid networks.

“The University of Pisa connects and secures a wide and distributed network of systems, users, applications and services to ensure our institution can provide the highest levels of on-campus and remote learning,” said University of Pisa CIO Antonio Cisternino. “It’s imperative that we’re able to use the same trusted security controls, regardless of how we deploy them. Through their growing range of virtual, cloud and hybrid offerings, SonicWall gives us that choice and flexibility without sacrificing the security standards we require to protect and enable students, faculty, and staff.”

SonicWall ensures organizations are able to set their own deployment paths and cloud migration timelines — not forcing them into a rigid vendor-first approach. By providing cloud-based (e.g., virtual firewall and VPN), as-a-service (e.g., ZTNA, FWaaS), and on-premises (e.g., firewalls, VPN) options, SonicWall empower customers to deploy what works for their architecture — and adopt cloud transformation at their pace.

These real-world hybrid environments are secured using a cohesive mix of virtual, cloud, and on-premises offerings, including SonicWall NSv virtual firewalls, Cloud Edge Secure Access zero-trust security, appliance-free SMA virtual private networks (VPN), and Cloud App Security to protect SaaS applications. Organizations are able to further scale and extend distributed environments by simultaneously deploying security across multiple locations — with minimal IT support — using Zero-Touch Deployment capabilities.

With the influx of work-from-home access, companies require a simple and secure way of connecting their workforce to resources they need — wherever they’re located. SonicWall embraces zero-trust security as a tenet of cybersecurity in a perimeter-less, cloud-first reality. SonicWall helps organizations easily and quickly connect remote users to on-premises resources, cloud-hosted applications, branch offices and public clouds.

In as few as 15 minutes, SonicWall Cloud Edge Secure Access — the company’s zero-trust network access (ZTNA) offering — quickly scales security beyond the perimeter through modern zero-trust principles. This results in logical trust zones that authenticate every user, device and location for secure access to only the specific services and resources they require.

New in SonicWall Capture Security Center 3.0, Unified Insights brings analytics from across SonicWall products, including physical and virtual firewalls, wireless access points, switches and endpoint security products into a single, customizable dashboard. This provides a central, easy-to-use location for monitoring environments and troubleshooting incidents, eliminating the need to multi-task across different consoles.

Paired with SonicWall Analytics, Capture Security Center 3.0 can transform large volumes of data (spanning tens of thousands of firewall nodes) into actionable insights and defensive actions against hidden risks across networks, applications and users — all with the visibility, precision, speed and scale of the cloud.

Regardless of deployment strategy, SonicWall ensures organizations can identify and block both known and unknown cyberattacks across traditional networks, public and private cloud infrastructure, and virtual environments by seamlessly integrating SonicWall physical and virtual firewalls when and where it makes sense for your business. The foundation of this ecosystem integrates with SonicWall’s cloud-based Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) multi-engine sandbox service to stop advanced cyberattacks, including never-before-seen malware and ransomware.