MWC25: How Netscout is Advancing AI-Driven Cybersecurity

At MWC Barcelona 2025, Netscout outlined its approach to integrating AI across its security portfolio, responding to the growing complexity of cyber threats targeting telecommunications networks.

In an exclusive interview, Darren Anstee, CTO for Security at Netscout, detailed how the company is developing solutions to address operational challenges faced by telecommunications companies.

“We're extending AI and automation into our security products through both new kinds of threat intelligence,” he says. 

“We’re also introducing new features and functionality within our products to reduce the operational overhead that our customers have, whilst accelerating their threat response capabilities.”

Building a threat intelligence network

Netscout's security division has developed threat intelligence capabilities that leverage data from service providers worldwide, creating a comprehensive view of emerging threats.

“My part within the company is the security part and I'm responsible for the strategy there, alongside our CEO,” Darren explains. “Where we've really focused our AI investments is in trying to solve specific customer problems that we're seeing out there.”

Netscout's security division is placing particular emphasis on developing threat intelligence capabilities that leverage data from hundreds of service providers worldwide.

Darren adds: “There are over 500 service providers who feed information to us every hour about their view of the internet and the threats that they're detecting. 

“That's a really unique picture at very high levels of granularity into the threats they're seeing, the traffic they're seeing, where those threats are coming from and going to.”

This strong visibility enables Netscout to refine data into actionable intelligence data for its customers.

“We deliver this data back to our customers every three hours so that they know where attacks are coming from,” Darren says. “This is so they can identify attacks on their networks more proactively.”

Finding the route cause

Beyond threat intelligence, Netscout is focusing on automation to address workload challenges faced by security teams. The company is engineering AI capabilities directly into its products to analyse attack traffic and automate configuration changes.

“What customers fundamentally want is more automated capability, which leads to faster response,” he shares. “Time to respond is everything, whether it's an operational issue or a security issue that's impacted the availability of the service.”

In its service assurance division, Netscout has introduced Omnis Analytics, which uses AI to refine data sets and identify primary problems within telecommunications networks.

“It's about taking expert resources and bringing the outcome straight to the surface, but then also giving the customer the information that led to those outcomes," Darren notes.

Instead of requiring operators to work through complex workflows to identify issues, the system provides immediate insights and underlying root cause analysis. 

Darren says: “Rather than them going through a workflow to figure out the issue, it tells them the problem right at the top and lets them see all of the root cause analysis underneath it.”

Identifying network problems

Security challenges faced by telecommunications providers continue to increase in complexity, particularly in the area of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Netscout reports that modern attacks constantly evolve, even during the attack itself.

Telco leader BT Group in particular processes roughly 2,000 signals of potential cyberattacks every second, which is equivalent to 200 million daily threats.

“On the security side, the big challenge that we see in a lot of our customers is that the attacks that they're facing are becoming more sophisticated,” Darren shares.

“These attacks are constantly changing and evolving - and that’s within an individual attack. So you won’t see a single attack vector being used, but combinations of attack vendors.”

This evolution is inevitably creating operational challenges for security teams, who must continually monitor and adjust their mitigation strategies. 

“Our customers are mitigating an attack, but then five minutes later they might need to look at that attack again because it may have evolved, or changed,” Darren says. “They may need to change their configuration in order to block that, so that obviously slows down the overall response.”

Darren explains that the challenge is further complicated when nation-state affiliated adversaries target multiple organisations simultaneously.

“That means if you're a service provider, you're probably doing that across multiple customers in parallel. So again, the operational workload all multiplies up,” he says.

As a result, Netscout's AI approach aims to advance the capabilities of existing security personnel by reducing the time spent on analysis and configuration modifications. 

On this, Darren explains: “Where we're focusing the AI, it means operators can spend less time on analysis and modifying configuration and mitigations over and over again so that they get the data that they need much faster.”

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