Cellular World Congress 2025 in Barcelona delivered on each promise – a record-breaking occasion with 109,000 attendees from 205 nations, with over 2,900 exhibitors, sponsors, and companions showcasing a powerful array of slicing‐edge matters, from 5G and IoT to Unified Safety for the AI-driven Future.
As all the time, Cisco’s presence showcased a set of improvements, reminiscent of the most recent safe connectivity options, demonstrated subsequent‐gen wi-fi improvements, and made a number of high-profile media bulletins that underscored our dedication to shaping the way forward for digital communications.
Cisco’s One Cisco technique was on full show, integrating networking, safety, observability, and Splunk options to ship unparalleled outcomes. This holistic method showcases how our clients can obtain AI-ready information facilities, future-proofed workplaces, and digital resilience.
Cisco at MWC 2025: A Powerhouse of Innovation
In true Cisco vogue, our sales space wasn’t only a area however relatively a hub of innovation and collaboration. Stay Demo Highlights included:
Classes From Earlier Occasions
Constructing on our experiences at Black Hat, NFL Tremendous Bowl, RSA Convention and others the Crew introduced the identical vitality and technical rigor to MWC 2025. Our SNOC staff leveraged the operational excellence honed at these occasions, mixing state-of-the-art safety instruments with real-time community monitoring to make sure seamless occasion operations.
The Splunk Cloud was used as the info platform, including Apps for information ingestion:
With these integrations, our SOC staff was capable of construct a CISO stage SNOC dashboard for vital telemetry from all community and safety sources.
We additionally had SOC Supervisor stage dashboards for XDR Incidents, Firewall Occasions and DNS Safety.
We additionally related the integrations with Cisco XDR, for Dashboard visibility and Incident investigation.
We had XDR Automate workflows to advertise risk detections in Splunk to XDR Incidents, and the XDR integration again into Splunk.
The Incidents empowered the SNOC staff to prioritize investigations.
Moreover, at this 12 months’s Cellular World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco’s ThousandEyes dashboard was instrumental in offering strong community assurance. Attendees benefited from real-time monitoring and insights into community efficiency, guaranteeing a seamless expertise from begin to end. With the potential to trace vital elements just like the occasion homepage and login processes, ThousandEyes ensured that individuals might entry important assets swiftly and with out interruption. This stage of detailed visibility and management helped preserve the integrity and reliability of the community all through the occasion.
Day 1: A Take a look at of Scale
Day 1 was all about dealing with huge community exercise seamlessly. From just a few employees units to hundreds of units connecting concurrently, our firewall and community monitoring techniques carried out flawlessly, processing a excessive quantity of visitors whereas sustaining pinpoint visibility. The strong efficiency of our Cisco safety options reaffirmed that, whether or not in a managed lab setting or amidst a vibrant convention, community resilience isn’t negotiable.
Day 2: When a Russian Risk Tried to Crash the Occasion
Simply as you assume the one surprises at MWC 2025 are the revolutionary tech and spontaneous demos, our firewall logs gave us an sudden twist. On Day 2, our vigilant monitoring detected an anomalous occasion: a privilege escalation occasion coming from a Russian supply.
Our technical maestro, Jorge Quintero, instantly flagged this as a possible high-risk occasion – a state of affairs the place an endpoint could be compromised. The logs confirmed a sample in line with C2 communications, prompting a fast investigation and swift remediation measures. In true SNOC model, we ensured that any unwelcome visitor was proven the door earlier than it might wreak havoc. (It appears even at MWC, cyber adversaries can’t resist the attract of the occasion!)
What actually stood out on this IDS occasion was a crafted plain-text script operating on port 80 with Web Explorer (sure – nonetheless in use).
The Snort signature that was triggered additionally highlighted two important strategies getting used:
Utilizing public generative AI instruments, the evaluation of the payload yielded the next outcomes, revealing constant patterns of malicious exercise — together with makes an attempt to determine anti-malware instruments (probably for removing to take care of persistence) and probably escalate privileges additional.
Lastly, what confirmed our suspicions (in the event that they weren’t already) got here from Talos and AlienVault risk intelligence. This IP deal with (belonging to the Russian Federation) had already been flagged for malicious exercise.
Day 3: Cryptomining — The Story of the Good and the Evil
Day 3 introduced an fascinating subject to our consideration — cryptomining. From its humble beginnings to the multi-billion-dollar business, it’s at the moment, we’ve witnessed the rise of crypto — now extending past simply cryptocurrency to revolutionary makes use of within the fintech area, together with NFTs and extra.
Nonetheless, we’ve additionally seen how this expertise has been leveraged by malicious actors, particularly to compromise endpoints and hijack computing assets for cryptomining.
Utilizing public generative AI instruments to decode plain textual content, we recognized mining software program (XMRig) making RPC calls to the Monero cryptocurrency community. Now, it’s price highlighting that, though suspicious, this might nonetheless be a professional case of an endpoint operating mining software program.
Nonetheless, the illegitimate nature of this exercise was confirmed once more by Talos and AlienVault intelligence. The general public IP deal with in use had already been flagged for involvement in malicious cryptomining operations.
Day 4: Slowdown and Occasion Wrap-Up!
Day 4 confirmed a slowdown in exercise, making it a threat-free day and giving us time to investigate and combination the whole dataset from the occasion. Listed here are a few key takeaways from the firewall evaluation:
1. EVE (Encrypted Visibility Engine): Paving the way in which for encrypted visitors evaluation.
Cisco’s Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) has confirmed that the innovation of latest years is critical. Monitoring at Fira was performed completely utilizing IDS (Intrusion Detection System) with passive evaluation. Even with out decryption capabilities, we had been capable of determine threats inside encrypted visitors, in addition to the processes producing these visitors stream.
2. Occasion-driven analytics, powered by Splunk
The Cisco + Splunk story is a match made in heaven. With Cisco’s depth and breadth in safety and a robust portfolio, mixed with Splunk’s world-class observability and suppleness, we had been capable of construct highly effective, actionable dashboards for simple consumption by the SNOC staff.
Under is the aggregated information for the whole occasion — masking every thing from connection occasions, file occasions, and intrusion occasions to a prioritized set of incidents recognized all through the conference.
This included DNS safety blocks, defending Fira’s Community attendees at MWC, from malicious web sites. Over 14,400 apps had been seen on the MWC community.
Wanting Forward
The sudden incident on Day 2 solely bolstered one important lesson: in at the moment’s hyper-connected world, innovation should all the time be matched with rigorous safety. As we replicate on the successes of MWC 2025, we’re already planning enhancements to our risk detection and incident response capabilities, drawing on each our MWC, Black Hat, and NFL experiences.
Cisco’s SNOC Crew stays dedicated to staying one step forward, turning each problem into a possibility to innovate and shield. Whether or not it’s managing tens of hundreds of connections or intercepting a rogue C2 sign, we’re prepared to make sure that the digital future is as safe as it’s good.
Whereas expertise was on full show, the actual stars of the Safety Sales space had been the devoted people who introduced these demos and operations to life. A heartfelt thanks to: Alberto Torralba, Filipe Lopes, Jorge Quintero, Jervis Hui, Nirav Shah, John Cardani-Trollinger, and Emile Antone. Their experience and dedication ensured that each demo ran flawlessly and captured the eye of each attendee. Particular appreciation to Ivan Padilla Ojeda, who was our liaison with the community staff to attach every thing within the SNOC.
Additionally, thanks to those that helped us put together for the SNOC: Ivan Berlinson, Ryan Maclennan, Aditya Sankar, Seyed Khadem, Tony Iacobelli, Dallas Williams, Nicholas Carrieri and Jessica Oppenheimer.
Wrapping Up
Cellular World Congress 2025 was not nearly showcasing the subsequent wave of technological innovation; it was additionally a robust demonstration of how built-in, resilient safety measures can safeguard even essentially the most bustling, high-stakes environments. The comparative insights from Day 1 and Day 2 underscore the significance of staying one step forward, continuously adapting, and constantly enhancing our protection methods.
Thanks for becoming a member of us on this journey by MWC 2025 and keep tuned for extra insights and behind-the-scenes tales from MWC 2025. In any case, on the planet of tech, it’s by no means simply one other day on the workplace!
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