About Swisscom

Swisscom is Switzerland’s leading telecommunications and IT company with its headquarter in Ittingen, close to Berne. Outside Switzerland, Swisscom has a presence on the Italian market under the brand Fastweb. In the first half of 2021, with over 19,000 employees, the company generated sales of CHF 5,583 million. Swisscom is considered one of Switzerland’s most sustainable and innovative companies, massively investing in the future network.

Situation

Emails are the primary attack vector for cybercriminals worldwide on network infiltration, utilizing phishing campaigns, or infecting machines with malware, spam, and DDoS attacks.

Managing more than 3 million mailboxes, Swisscom is the leading mail provider in Switzerland under the brand bluewin.ch and is facing more than 200 million email threats on a monthly basis. 

Challenges

The main challenge for the mail engineering team was to look for a solution that was capable of handling the massive amount of different email threats within Swisscom’s network.

As Swisscom uses several security layers for its email protection, another challenge was to ensure a smooth transition from its old blocklist provider to Abusix’s Mail Intelligence comprehensive and accurate blocklists.

Swisscom’s mail engineering team was looking for a new and more reliable partner that could filter the noticeable bad traffic better and more efficiently to adequately protect customers from email-borne threats such as spam and malware without any false positives.

Solution

Swisscom decided to use Abusix Mail Intelligence – a suite of IP and domain blocklists – as its first layer of email defense to protect its customers from unsolicited emails before they possibly harm Swisscom’s network reputation.

Before implementing Abusix Mail Intelligence, the email engineering team performed in-depth comparison tests and analytic measurements between Abusix and other blocklists solution providers. Abusix Mail Intelligence outperformed every one of them. 

Results

The data set provided within the Abusix Mail Intelligence blocklists results from more than 500 thousand spam traps and honeypots that process more than 800 million data points a day.

Swisscom is now seeing an enormous decrease in spam, malware, and phishing attacks with that data in place and other additional third-party solutions.

Having a cost-effective spam filter like Abusix Mail Intelligence in place is the only way we can handle the huge amount of spam that is coming our way, day in, day out.

Thomas Lademann, System Engineer

With its comprehensive suite of anti-abuse solutions, Abusix protects Swisscom’s email environment and helps its trust and safety team to automate its internal abuse management processes with AbuseHQ, the first SaaS abuse management platform in the market that allows internal security teams to handle abuse reports in an automated fashion by enabling real-time abuse mitigation.

Having AbuseHQ in place helps to keep Swisscom’s network clean from copyright infringement, bot traffic, malware, spam, and any other kind of abuse. The platform also allowed the team to ingest more external and internal data without reinforcing more resources.  

Swisscom can now detect and proactively react to new abuse patterns way faster than it used to. As a result, the team’s visibility within its network increased, and customer retention improved.