Challenge
Pernambucanas is a Brazilian retailer composed of hundreds of stores that sell Casual Fashion, Bed & Bath, and Appliances, among other categories of products. After starting an ambitious digital transformation process, Pernambucanas needed to further enhance its cybersecurity posture.
There are several cyber threats targeted at e-commerce platforms that can damage business’ reputation dramatically, with consequences that include service unavailability, credit card fraud, loss of sales, and theft of customers’ sensitive data.
In the face of these threats, enhancing Pernambucanas’s security is both a goal and an ongoing challenge that can only be overcome with modern technology designed to help deal with the highly complex cyber threats in the current landscape.
Solution
Pernambucanas counts on Azion’s for both mitigation of threats and data steamed to its existing analytics solutions through a set of edge-native products with automated, real-time features. Protection from the network to application layers (L3 to L7) ensures Pernambucanas’s e-commerce platform benefits from a defense in depth and against a wide variety of cyber threats, such as:
- SQL injections;
- bot attacks;
- cross-site scripting;
- remote file intrusions;
- unwanted access; and
- directory traversal.
To build a strong defense posture, Pernambucanas first implemented Edge Firewall and its Network Layer Protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS Protection modules enabling its cybersecurity experts to:
- create a control point to block malicious domains and communications for all users and devices in any location by using Network Lists;
- implement customized WAF rules that cover their website and APIs, including bypass functionality to allow one or more IP addresses to which rules will not apply; and
- mitigate large, complex DDoS attacks automatically without impacting the performance, availability, and reliability of Pernambucanas’s e-commerce platform.
In addition, Pernambucanas also improved bot management practices by integrating Radware Bot Manager via Edge Functions on the Azion Edge Compute platform, leveraging all our programmable firewall benefits. Radware Bot Manager is an easy-to-use solution that uses multiple advanced classification techniques, including machine learning, to detect and mitigate all kinds of sophisticated bad bots, including human-like bots.
To enhance its cybersecurity intelligence, Pernambucanas leveraged Data Streaming, which feeds its cybersecurity team with event insights and relevant data about its edge applications. All information is collected in real time and automatically sent to its infrastructure via endpoint connectors.
Results and impacts
In the first six months of using Edge Firewall, Pernambucanas blocked 374 K of cyber threats automatically, enabling its security experts to tightly concentrate on other business critical tasks and ways to further strengthen its zero-trust security strategy.
By using Radware Bot Manager, Pernambucanas’s squad gained automated monitoring, detection, and mitigation of bad bots through an intelligent decision engine. Also, all events can be closely monitored in real time using APIs or an out-of-path mode.
Improving their cybersecurity observability, Data Streaming delivered about 1,4 billion requests and transferred about 1.6 TB of data in one month.These richly detailed applications and WAF events are analyzed by Pernambucanas’s specialists through an integration with their existing analytics stack, enhancing decision making.
To gain full value from Edge Firewall and its powerful features, Pernambucanas counted on Azion’s Mission Critical Support, which helps its team to understand and build effective firewall rules, promoting onboardings and training, providing general guidance, and much more.
“The main benefits of implementing Edge Firewall modules were the creation of custom WAF rules that cover everything from our website to all our APIs and the mitigation of any type of DDoS attack without performance impacts.”
Diego Romano, Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) at Pernambucanas
About Pernambucanas
Established in 1908, Pernambucanas Group offers a wide variety of products, including fashion, bed & bath, appliances and computers, for Brazilian customers around the country. For over 110 years, the company keeps growing and evolving its services through digital transformation. In 2020, Pernambucanas’s e-commerce platform grew 1,081% and advanced the Fígital (Pernambucana’s phygital services): an integration between digital and physical channel experiences. Designed by teams from its Commercial and Digital Labs, the Pernambucanas innovation laboratories are composed of the largest and most talented multidisciplinary squads. Besides its more than 410 stores in Brazil, mobile and web e-commerce applications, and Fígital, Pernambucanas also has its own fintech services, Pefisa, which offers a lot of financial products and services, such as digital accounts, PIX transfers, digital wallets, credit cards, personal loans, and insurance, with everything available online.