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Tag: performance management

  • Quest Merchant Bank appoints Ayo Lewis as Executive Director, Risk Management & ECO

    Quest Merchant Bank appoints Ayo Lewis as Executive Director, Risk Management & ECO

    Quest Merchant Bank has announced the appointment of Mr. Andrew Olufunmilayo Lewis (Ayo Lewis) as Executive Director, Risk Management and Executive Compliance Officer (ECO), following regulatory approval by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

    The appointment reinforces the Bank’s strategic commitment to strong governance, disciplined risk management, and institutional resilience as it advances its long‑term growth and transformation agenda.

    Ayo Lewis brings over 33 years of deep, cross‑functional experience in the financial services industry, spanning enterprise risk management, regulatory compliance, and banking operations. He joins Quest Merchant Bank from Sterling Financial Holdings Company, where he served as Group Chief Risk Officer, providing strategic leadership in the design and implementation of integrated risk management frameworks and the optimisation of enterprise‑wide risk portfolios across multiple subsidiaries.

    Earlier in his career, Ayo spent more than two decades in market‑facing roles across consumer, commercial, and corporate banking. This blend of frontline banking experience and senior risk leadership equips him with a balanced, market‑informed perspective on risk, performance management, and value creation—an asset that will be critical as the Bank continues to scale responsibly.

    In his capacity as Executive Director, Risk Management & ECO, Ayo Lewis will drive operational efficiency and reinforce a risk culture aligned with sustainable growth and regulatory excellence.

    Commenting on the appointment, Afolabi Olorode, Ag. Managing Director/CEO, Quest Merchant Bank, said:

    “Ayo’s appointment reflects our deliberate and disciplined approach to building a strong, forward‑looking institution anchored on robust governance and sound risk practices. His depth of experience and proven leadership will be instrumental as we continue to execute our strategy and deliver long‑term value to our clients and stakeholders.”

    Ayo Lewis holds a degree in Actuarial Science from the University of Lagos and has completed executive education programmes at leading global institutions, including Stanford University, The Wharton School, London School of Management and Leadership, and Lagos Business School.

  • NETSCOUT leverages AI/ML to guard critical IT Infrastructure and minimise Business Risk

    NETSCOUT leverages AI/ML to guard critical IT Infrastructure and minimise Business Risk

    … Enhanced Capabilities Identify and Mitigate Dynamically Changing, AI-Enabled DDoS Attacks

     NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC. (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of performance management, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, has announced updates to its industry-leading Arbor Edge Defense (AED) and Arbor Enterprise Manager (AEM) products as part of its Adaptive DDoS Protection Solution to combat AI-enabled DDoS threats and protect critical IT infrastructure. NETSCOUT’s DDoS Threat Intelligence Report noted that application-layer and volumetric attacks have increased by over 43% and 30%, respectively. DDoS-for-hire services have also increased in number and sophistication, making attacks easier to launch. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also recently released a cybersecurity advisory that validated the need for better controls to prevent and detect malicious activity, reinforcing enterprises’ need for protective solutions to minimise business risk.

    “According to recent IDC research, IT environment complexity is often the top challenge to an organisation’s mitigation efforts, especially as attackers continually modulate their attack vectors using AI to challenge defences,” said Chris Rodriguez, Research Director, Security & Trust, IDC. “Organisations need to invest in proactive, adaptive measures to protect their environments like those provided by NETSCOUT’s Adaptive DDoS Protection solution. Reactive or static mitigation that lacks sophisticated intelligence creates unnecessary risk and opens the door for costly damage to business productivity and reputation.”

    NETSCOUT employs artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology in its ATLAS Threat Intelligence Feed and in a unique set of capabilities for adaptive DDoS protection. The NETSCOUT ATLAS global threat intelligence system monitors over 550 Tbps of Internet traffic in real-time across over 500 ISPs and 2000-plus enterprise sites from over 100 countries. The AI/ML algorithms run in the ATLAS cloud infrastructure as part of a product-independent data collection and analysis pipeline that can be updated anytime without requiring product software or customer site updates.

    AI/ML technology is also used in the latest AED and AEM releases to create a repeatable closed-loop DDoS attack analysis and mitigation process that automatically identifies changing attack vectors and provides recommendations specific to those attack vectors for attack mitigation, with the option to automatically apply those recommendations. NETSCOUT’s AI/ML-powered ATLAS Threat Intelligence and Adaptive DDoS Protection solution utilising AED and AEM automates DDoS attack detection and protection workflows to reduce downtime costs and provide better protection for business-critical services whether they reside on-premises or live in the public cloud.

    “Adaptive DDoS Protection provides customers with a sophisticated feature set designed to stop the ever-evolving threats to critical IT infrastructure, which has increased by 55% over the last four years,” said Scott Iekel-Johnson, AVP, DDoS and Threat Intelligence at NETSCOUT. “We’re continually adding new capabilities to our solution to help organisations protect assets anywhere, including on-premises, in a private data centre, or a public cloud through a single solution.”

    Additional enhancements include holistic management and visibility into blocking non-DDoS threats, a new appliance that supports up to 200 Gbps of DDoS attack mitigation capacity and high-performance decryption, and Virtual AED’s extended support for Microsoft Azure public cloud environments, in addition to AWS Cloud, for unified hybrid-cloud DDoS attack protection.

  • NETSCOUT defends Customers from Cyberattacks with Automated, Real-Time Traffic Analysis, Global Threat Intelligence, and ML-Based Mitigation

    NETSCOUT defends Customers from Cyberattacks with Automated, Real-Time Traffic Analysis, Global Threat Intelligence, and ML-Based Mitigation

    …Adaptive DDoS Protection for Arbor TMS Dramatically Improves Dynamic Distributed Attack Detection Including Carpet Bombing 

    NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC. (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of performance management, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, has launched Adaptive DDoS Protection for its Arbor® Threat Mitigation System (TMS) to dramatically improve detection of distributed attacks that dynamically change vectors and target numerous  destination IP addresses at once.

    NETSCOUT ASERT, the company’s expert security research and DDoS attack mitigation team, has documented a significant increase in dynamic Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks using multiple vectors and techniques to launch botnet-based, direct-path, state exhaustion, and application-layer attacks designed to evade conventional static network and cloud-only-based DDoS defences. Carpet-bombing attacks have risen by more than 110%. They are particularly challenging for SOC teams to mitigate using conventional means as these attacks target large swaths of IP addresses versus a single host and generate hundreds or thousands of alerts per attack. 

    “Direct path attacks are overtaking reflection/amplification as the most popular DDoS attack vector, and they are increasingly botnet-driven, multi-vector, and dynamically adjusted in real-time,” said Patrick Donegan, founder and principal analyst, HardenStance. “NETSCOUT knows more about DDoS attacks than any other company. ASERT analyses highly curated data from its ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) and uses ML-based algorithms to recommend changes to attack countermeasures to stop DDoS attacks. Automating this functionality to bring intelligence into its Adaptive DDoS Protection functionality makes Arbor TMS even more compelling in mitigating DDoS attacks.”

    Adaptive DDoS Protection analyses traffic in real-time and automatically implements threat intelligence-driven mitigations and countermeasures to block dynamic DDoS attacks as they evolve. Adaptive DDoS Protection gives SOC teams a scalable, always-on, stateless packet processing solution that uses unmatched visibility into more than 50% of all internet traffic, real-time global DDoS attack threat intelligence, and decades of DDoS mitigation experience to automatically detect, adapt to, and mitigate dynamic DDoS attacks.

    Defending Against Carpet Bombing

    Carpet bombing attacks are one of the most devastating distributed attacks bad actors can initiate since they target large ranges of IP addresses simultaneously, generating thousands of attack alerts that are impossible for SOC teams to manage. Through Adaptive DDoS Protection, NETSCOUT has introduced a new way to understand DDoS traffic at the network level across all subnets to detect and report on carpet bombing attacks in one, easy-to-understand alert. NETSCOUT’s ML-based Precise Protection Prefix technology automatically determines the specific IP ranges targeted by the attack. It then automatically redirects those to Arbor TMS for mitigation, even as the attack moves around the network to different targets. This Adaptive DDoS Protection capability dramatically improves the detection and mitigation of carpet-bombing attacks.

    “Defending a network requires as much knowledge about your adversary as possible,” said Scott Iekel-Johnson, AVP, DDoS and Threat Intelligence at NETSCOUT. “We have embedded our global threat intelligence and decades of attack mitigation experience into this product. It’s like having an ASERT analyst at your side 24/7. Our Adaptive DDoS Protection finds attacks that other solutions miss through dynamic detection and intelligent redirection to enable Arbor TMS to mitigate DDoS attacks better than any other solution on the market.”