NETSCOUT® (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of observability, AIOps, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, today announced an extension of its Adaptive DDoS Protection (ADP) solution enabling service providers to automatically detect and mitigate outbound DDoS attack traffic. By extending protection from the attack target towards its source, NETSCOUT helps operators prevent compromised subscriber devices from disrupting their own networks, consuming costly capacity and attacking customers and organizations across the internet.

Consumer broadband routers, cameras and other IoT devices are increasingly being weaponized by Turbo-Mirai class botnets capable of generating multi-terabit attacks. These outbound attacks have already caused costly service outages, reputational damage and customer loss, and damage to peering relationships risking a large increase in transit costs at service providers around the world. By detecting and mitigating malicious traffic generated by compromised device populations before it leaves their networks, service providers can reduce abuse complaints and infrastructure costs while protecting their own networks and services and helping lower subscriber churn and regulatory risk.

“The combination of higher-speed broadband connectivity and vulnerable IoT devices has been weaponized by a new class of massive DDoS botnets,” said Patrick Donegan, founder and principal analyst, HardenStance. “Source-side mitigation, or attack suppression as it’s sometimes known, is a critical part of the equation. NETSCOUT’s approach, backed by its ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) and ASERT analysts, gives service providers the tools they need to detect and stop attacks before they have an impact, protecting their customers and the broader internet from the large-scale DDoS attacks we have seen.”

Using AI-powered threat intelligence and automated detection and mitigation, NETSCOUT’s ADP solution, an addition to its Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System:

• Automatically detects and mitigates ever evolving attacks through dynamic detection, intelligent redirection and adaptive mitigation.
• Extends these capabilities to outbound traffic, combining enhanced, customized detection with comprehensive threat intelligence tailored for each ISP.
• Uses NETSCOUT’s proprietary AI/ML-powered DDoS detection to analyze massive volumes of outbound internet traffic to uncover attacks designed to hide within legitimate flows.
• Draws on unique global real-time intelligence of DDoS activity covering approximately half of all internet traffic to rapidly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and pinpoint the responsible, compromised devices.

“We are extending DDoS defense from the target to the source,” stated Darren Anstee, CTO, Security, NETSCOUT. “By using our internet-scale visibility to derive localized threat intelligence for our customers, NETSCOUT can identify and precisely suppress attacks at their origin, before they cause problems locally or at their target. This capability gives our customers a new level of comprehensive defense across their peering, transit, cloud and customer edges.”

This expansion of capabilities demonstrates how NETSCOUT is applying its global threat visibility and proven ADP solution to meet emerging service provider challenges. By extending an established inbound DDoS workflow to outbound and cross-bound threats, NETSCOUT enables operators to improve network-resilience, cost-controls and revenue protection through its proven Arbor Sightline and Arbor TMS solutions.

Illumio Inc., the breach containment company, today announced it has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026  report. Illumio received the highest scores among all evaluated vendors in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories and was named a “Customer Favorite” for its outstanding customer feedback among evaluated vendors. According to the report, “Repeat customers indicate their satisfaction with the consistently high quality of technical support, regardless of the personnel assigned to their account.”  

The report evaluated 10 microsegmentation providers against a comprehensive set of criteria covering product capabilities, strategy, innovation, and customer experience. Illumio received the highest scores possible in 10 evaluation criteria, including areas related to visualization, host-based enforcement, product security, vision, and innovation. According to the report, “Illumio excels at essential microsegmentation functions.”

“Illumio was founded on a simple belief: breaches are inevitable, but cyber disasters are not. We have been singularly focused on one objective — reducing lateral movement and attack surface, and increasing resilience in every organization,” said Andrew Rubin, CEO and Founder of Illumio. “Being named both a Leader and a Customer Favorite reflects to us the strength of our technology, vision, and even more importantly our ability to deliver real outcomes and risk reduction, which is the foundation of the trust our customers place in us every day. In the model threat world we are all now entering, defense must be coupled with resilience. Recovery is the new defense — and the new cyber.”

According to the Forrester Research report, “Organizations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio.”  The report also recognized Illumio for:

• “Illumio has articulated a vision for microsegmentation as a core element of security operations.”
• “Illumio is bridging the gap between its traditional users and other parts of the security organization by delivering agents mapped to personas from other teams.”
• “Its UI provides easy access to information that supports both access control and incident response use cases.”

The recognition follows continued innovation across the Illumio Platform, including Network Posture, which helps organizations understand security posture based on real-world traffic and prioritize risk reduction efforts. These capabilities support the growing need for visibility, cyber resilience, and regulatory readiness across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Designed for operational simplicity, the Illumio Platform combines Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation to help organizations identify, assess, and contain cyber risk across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Security teams can uncover high-risk exposures, visualize potential attack paths, and implement segmentation policies from a single platform to contain threats and improve cyber resilience.

The platform is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations, including BNP Paribas, eBay, and Microsoft, the latter of which has deployed Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation across its entire corporate IT environment. Igor Tsyganskiy, Global CISO of Microsoft, said: “When we needed to bring these capabilities into Microsoft, Illumio was the only segmentation solution that would work at the scale of Microsoft and deliver in our environment.”

By Tejas Mehta, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Middle East & Africa at Qlik

For decades, organizations have worked to use data to make better decisions and drive better outcomes. Data has become the lifeblood of business, and AI now has the power to unlock it in new ways. With AI adoption across GCC organizations surging from 62% in 2023 to 84% in 2025, the paradigm is shifting from dashboards and visual interfaces to AI-driven experiences.

But too much data is still stuck in silos, incomplete, and inaccurate. Many analytics workflows remain manual, which slows time to value, limits insight quality, and raises costs. This challenge is visible across the GCC, where rapid digital transformation agendas are generating vast volumes of data, but organizations still struggle to unify and operationalize it effectively.

A common misstep among organizations is assuming that more AI or better models alone will solve this problem. In reality, the gap is not in intelligence, but in how data, context, and workflows are connected. Without that foundation, even the most advanced AI will fall short of delivering meaningful business impact.

But what if AI could do more of the heavy lifting, safely and reliably?

That’s the promise of agentic AI, and it’s quickly becoming reality. Agentic AI can reason through multi-step problems, adapt its approach, and engage the right capabilities to achieve a goal with minimal human involvement. Done right, it accelerates insight, lowers costs, and allows teams to focus more on running the business rather than managing manual processes.

Rethinking AI in Practice

Today, we are seeing the emergence of AI systems capable of handling structured analytics, unstructured knowledge, anomaly detection, and decision support, all within a unified experience. More importantly, these systems are becoming interoperable, allowing organizations to integrate AI into existing tools and workflows rather than replacing them entirely.

This flexibility is crucial in the GCC, where enterprises often operate across hybrid environments and must balance innovation with governance, compliance, and data sovereignty requirements.

Overall, there are effectively two entry points into this new AI paradigm:

First, embedded AI experiences within enterprise platforms are enabling faster, more contextual insights, grounded in trusted data and existing business logic.

Second, open integration layers are allowing organizations to connect AI capabilities into the assistants and environments they already use, ensuring flexibility while maintaining governance and control.

Making Data Work for AI

To move from fragmented data and isolated AI initiatives to true agentic systems, organizations need a clear operating model that connects data, insights, and action. This is where three practical priorities come into focus:

• Achieve AI: Organizations need trusted, explainable insights embedded directly into workflows, while maintaining governance and context.
• Accelerate AI: Many enterprises have already invested heavily in data models and business logic. The focus now is on building on that foundation to prove value quickly and scale efficiently.
• Adapt AI: The future will not belong to a single assistant, vendor, or ecosystem. Interoperability will define success, allowing organizations to evolve without starting over.

Across the GCC, this adaptability is especially important as governments and enterprises push for AI leadership while maintaining flexibility to adopt global innovations.

Lessons from Early Adoption

Early adopters of agentic AI are already demonstrating tangible value.

A commercial leader can ask what changed in renewals this quarter, and immediately see the drivers, segments, and recommended next steps in one place.

An operations team can move from identifying a spike in service issues to understanding where it is concentrated, what factors are correlated, and what actions to prioritize, without switching between multiple tools.

A finance team can reconcile narrative and numbers while maintaining traceability, ensuring every insight is backed by clear evidence.

These use cases are highly relevant in the GCC, where sectors such as banking, telecom, and government are under increasing pressure to deliver faster, data-driven decisions while maintaining transparency and accountability.

A Regional Perspective on What Comes Next

AI conversation is moving beyond models. The real challenge lies in making AI dependable, explainable, and useful within the flow of work.

If organizations cannot connect analytics with knowledge, they don’t have agentic AI. They simply have automation without accountability.

For the GCC, where trust, governance, and strategic national initiatives play a central role, this distinction is critical. AI must not only be powerful; it must be responsible, transparent, and aligned with long-term economic visions.

Ultimately, the opportunity is clear: organizations that can successfully unify their data, embed intelligence into everyday workflows, and enable AI to act with context and accountability will define the next era of digital leadership in the region.