Major European-Based Energy Company

Company Overview

This European-based energy company has evolved and expanded to address changes in the global landscape. From renewable energy to enriching a circular economy, they specialize in generating and distributing electric power while providing solutions such as recharging stations, solar panels, and beyond.

Challenges

Account takeover attacks overload infrastructure and may compromise customer access

This energy company is focused on ensuring its production of renewable power and grid management is efficient and secure. That focus on efficiency and security extends to its secure customer interactions for bill viewing and payment, contracts, and more through its website and applications.

As the company faced the evolving landscape of cyber threats targeted at their applications, they successfully countered traditional attacks, such as DDoS and OWASP- type threats, with Imperva Cloud WAF.

However, a new adversary emerged in the form of account takeover attacks which involved requests to the company’s authentication endpoint. The attacks bypassed traditional security measures by targeting the business logic of their login application. Amplified by the company’s scale, they experienced relentless credential-stuffing attacks, involving millions of malicious requests. Due to their sophistication and highly distributed nature, these attacks rendered rate limiting ineffective and often left three to five team members working without results for up to a week. These low-and-slow attacks utilized thousands of IPs, all making requests at rates lower than the threshold to avoid triggering any rules. This forced the company to simultaneously thwart the attacks, while also preserving seamless access for legitimate customers.

Deployment

Harnessing the power of Imperva Account Takeover Protection

Because of its trusted partnership with Imperva, the company opted to expand its Imperva footprint by incorporating Imperva Account Takeover Protection, fortifying its security defense against audacious account takeover attacks. This strategic expansion is a testament to their satisfaction with Imperva’s solutions and their commitment to maintaining protection.

Imperva Account Takeover Protection addresses malicious login attempts while maintaining a seamless user experience. Utilizing an advanced, multilayered approach, Imperva is able to accurately determine if the interactions with a website have the characteristics of an account takeover attempt in order to decide to stop attacks from the first request. By immediately working to mitigate malicious logins closest to where they originate, it enhances the security of user accounts as well as the stability and reliability of the application.

With Account Takeover Protection being tightly integrated into Imperva Cloud WAF and dedicated support from the Imperva team, the company seamlessly deployed
the solution at five sites in 30-60 minutes each. The out-of-the-box configuration of Account Takeover Protection provided an extensive suite of defense mechanisms, eliminating the need for much customization. The simplicity of the onboarding process allowed for swift activation, empowering them to work to neutralize impending threats and to proceed to safeguard their digital assets quickly.

Results

Safeguarding user experience with Imperva Account Takeover Protection

The expedited onboarding resulted in Account Takeover Protection for the purpose of shielding against malicious incursions immediately and alleviating any unnecessary stress on their infrastructure, or their teams. Notably, it mitigated an attack that consisted of no less than 22.5 million malicious requests, spanning three days.

During the attack, the solution blocked a peak of 75,000 malicious requests within a time frame of just five minutes. The absence of false positives testified to the effectiveness of the solution in real-time protection and helped to allow for uninterrupted access for esteemed customers.

“Imperva empowers us to maintain the unwavering availability of our websites and mobile apps, even amidst the most audacious onslaughts,” affirmed a member of the company’s cyber emergency readiness team.

By providing tools which help to safeguard customer access and for preserving infrastructure resources, Imperva Account Takeover Protection fortifies this energy company’s security posture, enabling them to redouble their commitment to delivering seamless and reliable services to their valued customers across Europe.