FIC 2017: Orange sets up a cyber defense center near Lille

Live from Lille. Stéphane Richard had promised it, he did it. After announcing last year during the previous edition of the FIC the creation near Lille of a cyberdefense pole, the CEO of Orange has just formalized its opening today. It is in Lesquin that Orange Cyberdefense, a security entity for companies, dependent on the operator’s Business Services activity, has chosen to install it on an area of ​​1,500 square meters. “This pole is connected with our Rennes cybersoc which detects embezzlement and attacks targeting our customers, while the cyberdefense pole provides a response to incidents”, explained during a press conference on Tuesday morning Thierry Bonhomme, director of Orange Business Services. “There will be no digital transformation if you don’t have complete confidence in the tools that customers use. Concretely, the new center located in Hauts-de-France will offer consulting services coupled with “reactive, proactive and predictive” services in cybersecurity.

Since January 2016, Orange Cyberdefense has concentrated all the skills and infrastructures dedicated to security from Orange Business Services, the operator’s IT services division for businesses. This activity also includes those of Atheos, acquired in 2014, and Lexsi in 2016. Worldwide, Orange’s cyberdefense activity employs 1,200 people and has 6 security operations centers (SOCs), in France, in Belgium, Mauritius, India and Egypt. For the moment, the cyberdefense pole of Lille employs about fifty people, mainly engineers but also Bac+2/3 specialized in penetration testing. “Above all, we are looking for passionate people,” said Michel Van Den Berghe, CEO of Orange Cyberdéfense. The workforce of the division, which will soon obtain ANSSI certification, should climb to 100 in 2017 and reach 200 by 2018.

Diploma course which can evolve into a permanent contract at Orange Cyberdefense

“We are able to repel DDoS attacks up to 8 TB per second and can clean up to 2.8 TB of data per second”, explained Michel Van Den Berghe. This is made possible thanks to the three traffic cleaning centers in France and the United States, activated when an attack is detected. “We are correlating 21 billion events a day and stopping more and more phishing attacks which now constitute 65% of security attacks.” In order to help the most vulnerable companies to fight against cyber threats – 9 SMEs out of 10 have no protection in terms of cybersecurity according to Orange – the operator intends to launch soon a security box integrating numerous functions ((anti- phishing, anti-malware, etc., which will be placed upstream of the Internet box. Details will be provided at the next Orange Hello show in the spring.

This morning, Orange also announced the opening of the Cyberdefense Academy, an initial training course consisting of technical and functional training courses developed in collaboration with the Cnam in the fields of information systems and network architecture, security management or analysis and response to malicious code. At the end of this diploma course (higher technician or engineer specializing in cybersecurity), permanent contracts may be offered within Orange Cyberdefense. A continuous training program is also offered in parallel to allow companies to acquire their own cyber experts.