ASL Airlines

ASL Aviation Holdings is a global aviation group running air cargo, passenger operations and aircraft leasing, with a fleet of over 160 aircraft and 3,000 aviation professionals across 57 nationalities, serving express cargo customers such as DHL, Amazon and FedEx across hub-and-spoke airports in Europe, the Far East, Australia, South Africa, Thailand and India.

Aviation faces constant targeting by sophisticated attacks, and for ASL specifically the challenge was compounded by a highly mobile workforce and operations dispersed across many countries. As the company accelerated its digital transformation, the COVID-19 pandemic added further pressure around securing cloud infrastructure, protecting remote workers and maintaining data protection. ASL needed a partner that understood aviation's specific business requirements, not a generic security package.

ASL gained full visibility of its systems, of actions taken across them, and of active scanning and attack attempts against its infrastructure, visibility the team says is the precondition for being able to respond at all. In practice, this means the ability to disable a compromised account, apply multi-factor authentication where it wasn't already in place, or geo-block a location actively attacking ASL's infrastructure.

ASL's engagement with Smarttech247 started with core SOC and SIEM services (IBM QRadar), then expanded to Nessus for vulnerability scanning and Tanium for enterprise patch management. In each case, Smarttech247 worked with ASL to get the most out of the product's features rather than running it as a bare deployment.

Smarttech247's MDR solution for ASL combines four components: continuous SOC monitoring and management through IBM QRadar, proactive threat and vulnerability scanning with prioritised remediation, security auditing and GRC integration to meet aviation industry standards, and a layered cyber defence framework covering operations, data and reputation.

"If you don't have your fundamental cyber hygiene factors organised correctly, you can't go looking at areas like innovation and growth within your IT infrastructure. You've got to sort out the fundamentals, your cyber hygiene, your inventory, your log management, and with a partner like Smarttech247, we're able to then focus on improving it to help us grow the business."