Chelles is a French municipality located in the Seine-et-Marne department, in the Île-de-France region, and is part of the Paris metropolitan area. With a population of 54,372 according to the 2020 census, Chelles is the second-most populous municipality in its department, behind Meaux.
Far from being a new town, Chelles bears witness to the lives of many monarchs. A summer retreat for Merovingian kings, it was home to a magnificent Royal Abbey and numerous abbesses. As a result, Chelles holds the largest collections of relics and authentic artifacts, surpassing even those of the Vatican. The city also has a long history of agriculture and livestock farming.
Antoine Trillard, Chief Information Officer for the City of Chelles, turned to OGO Security to address the security challenges facing the city’s two websites: the official municipal site and the cultural website ‘Les Cuizines’
OGO Security & Chelles
Antoine Trillard, CIO of Chelles
“We wanted to improve security on our websites because we had been targeted by malicious bots in the past. The idea was to secure our corporate website (which is not an e-commerce site) – not for financial reasons, but for reputational ones. Since the site is hosted in the cloud and isn’t part of our infrastructure, we turned to OGO for all of our sites that we don’t host ourselves, including the corporate website and the ‘cuizines’ site.”
Malicious attacks are commonplace on the Internet, and any website can be targeted—even institutional sites. Hackers have many methods for gaining access to your website, including denial-of-service (DoS or DDoS—the second “D” stands for “distributed”) attacks, brute-force attacks, SQL injections, XSS attacks, and many others.
It is therefore important to identify potential vulnerabilities on your website so you can fix them:
- by scanning your website to identify vulnerabilities in installed software and then applying the necessary updates
- by analyzing the website’s code using code analysis tools (Saast/IAST/Dast) to minimize vulnerabilities on the live site
- implementing a policy of regular security updates
- training your teams in secure development practices
Next, it’s important to train your own employees on best security practices, such as:
- creating strong passwords
- raising awareness about phishing
“Clearly, the types of attacks we experienced before OGO have not recurred. Given that our institutional website is managed by the city’s communications department – which is all the more reassuring considering that cybersecurity is far from their core business – not to mention that our CMS is WordPress, the most widely used CMS in the world and, by default, the most frequently targeted.”
There are many tools available to assess your website’s security, such as vulnerability scanners, penetration tests, and bug bounties. Using these tools will allow you to identify potential security vulnerabilities on your website and fix them before they can be exploited by cybercriminals.
By using a WAF, you can improve your website’s security by blocking attacks before they can cause damage. This can help you avoid data loss, downtime, and the recovery costs associated with successful attacks. In addition, using a WAF can help you avoid fines and penalties related to non-compliance with security standards, such as GDPR compliance.
The WAF by OGO Security
“We’ve been using OGO since November 2020. We looked at other solutions, but OGO seemed like the easiest to set up because it required very little configuration. Because the OGO solution is so simple, we don’t need to allocate internal resources to run or configure it. Setup takes just 30 minutes! While we do have regular check-ins with the OGO team – especially to review new features – the truth is, we don’t have to worry about it! All the buzz around AI wasn’t a concern or a roadblock for us; AI is used for calculations aimed at improving the solution, but there are always people behind the tools.”
OGO Security’s Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) service is based on artificial intelligence and behavioral analytics technology that ensures the security of your web applications.
- High Performance: The analysis must not degrade the site’s quality of service by adding an analysis delay to the site’s response time.
- Explainability: The decisions made by the engine are documented and explicit.
- Adaptability: It is possible to manually configure the engine’s behavior using understandable parameters to handle all special cases.
Although the engine is tuned for optimal efficiency, cybersecurity experts can individually configure each sensor and actuator within the engine. Expert Mode, with over a hundred parameters, allows users to get the most out of the OGO engine in very specific contexts.
Zero Rules provides real-time automation of security policies tailored to each web application protected by OGO, while significantly reducing false positives (0.001%).
Reporting for the solution is done through our dashboard, which includes the following features:
- Real-time attack visualization (type, source, etc.)
- Automatic updates
- SSL certificate management
- Dashboard sharing (access control)
- Log retention
Every month, our customers receive an activity report covering all web applications protected by OGO.
“OGO is a simple AND effective solution that meets a specific need.”
