Vodafone Oman Builds a Lean, Automated Defense with CrowdStrike

In the Middle East, where cyber threats range from financially motivated ransomware to politically driven attacks, Vodafone Oman is redefining what modern defense looks like. With just four analysts protecting more than five million customers across one of the region’s fastest 5G networks, the company has built a lean, intelligent security operation powered by the unified CrowdStrike Falcon® platform.

For CISO Jaifar Al Mamari, the results speak for themselves: full visibility, automated vulnerability management, and identity-aware defense — all without expanding headcount. 

“We built cybersecurity from the ground up to be smart, not big,” he said. “With CrowdStrike, we can do in hours what used to take teams of people. The platform makes that scale possible.”

When Vodafone Oman launched four years ago as a greenfield, cloud-native operator, Al Mamari saw an opportunity to break away from traditional telecom security. Instead of layering best-of-breed point tools, his team designed an integrated ecosystem that could correlate telemetry across endpoint, identity, and cloud domains from the start.

They began with CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR for endpoint visibility, then steadily expanded to add exposure management, identity protection, cloud security, threat intelligence, and more, all from the same lightweight Falcon sensor. Each addition was earned through proven value and performance.

“We grew with CrowdStrike because the value kept compounding,” Al Mamari said. “When the platform correlates endpoint, identity, cloud, and dark web intelligence, a small team can operate at massive scale.”

Today, Vodafone Oman is the first and most influential Vodafone market to consolidate fully on the Falcon platform — a model that’s now shaping the company’s regional cybersecurity strategy. Al Mamari frequently advises peers across the Middle East and Vodafone partner markets on how to replicate Oman’s lean-team model, using the Falcon platform as the foundation for automation and visibility.

As identity-based attacks surged globally, Al Mamari recognized the growing danger of stolen credentials and access brokers operating on the dark web. “Identity has become the new frontier,” he said. “Attackers don’t always need zero-days anymore, they just buy access.”

CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection helps Vodafone Oman stay ahead of that trend by correlating identities across Active Directory, SaaS applications, and both public and private clouds. Powered by AI, the module analyzes billions of authentication events in real time to establish behavioral baselines and flag deviations — from “impossible travel” to unusual privilege use — as they happen. It also recognizes that the same user may appear under different identities across environments and stitches those signals together, revealing connections that would otherwise remain invisible.

This internal visibility is paired with external intelligence through Recon+, a capability of CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary Intelligence, which monitors the dark web for signs of stolen data and exposed credentials. With a dedicated analyst validating alerts, Recon+ filters thousands of daily mentions down to credible exposures, including those tied to third-party suppliers.

“Recon+ filtered out the noise and surfaced real supplier breaches,” Al Mamari said. “Paired with identity protection, we caught credential risks early and acted before they became our problem.”

Together, the two capabilities have helped Vodafone Oman detect multiple supplier-related incidents and strengthen its overall supply-chain resilience, a growing concern across the telecom sector.

Automation is the heartbeat of Vodafone Oman’s cybersecurity strategy. Using CrowdStrike’s open APIs, Al Mamari’s team built a fully automated vulnerability management pipeline powered by ExPRT.AI: CrowdStrike’s AI-powered vulnerability prioritization score, which ranks vulnerabilities based on active exploitation, prevalence, and ease of abuse. 

The tool automatically identifies critical exposures, opens and assigns tickets, and tracks remediation progress across IT and engineering teams. “ExPRT tells us what’s actually being used by adversaries,” Al Mamari said. “Our patch management is fully hands-off, and our analysts can focus on what really matters.”

That same philosophy drives what Al Mamari calls a “zero-touch SOC.” High-fidelity alerts trigger automated workflows and notifications after hours, while low-risk detections wait until business hours. “We chose not to build a fat SOC,” he added. “With Falcon, a lean team can move faster, stay sharper, and still cover everything that matters.”

Even with deep automation, Vodafone Oman continuously tests its defenses through red-team simulations. Every time, CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary OverWatch detects the activity in real time. “When our own red team tries to break in, OverWatch catches them,” Al Mamari said. “That 24/7 coverage gives us proof and confidence that our system works.”

Vodafone Oman’s environment spans AWS, private telecom clouds, and dozens of SaaS applications, all unified under the Falcon platform. CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security extends prevention and detection to containerized workloads, while shared telemetry across modules delivers seamless visibility across every environment.

This integration is key to stopping today’s cross-domain attacks, in which adversaries pivot from identity to endpoint to cloud in a single campaign. “CrowdStrike is the only company that gives us visibility into every vertical — endpoints, workloads, identities, and even the dark web,” Al Mamari said.

By consolidating on the Falcon platform, Vodafone Oman avoided the operational drag of siloed tools while improving speed, efficiency, and confidence. The results are quantifiable: more than 70 billion telemetry events are analyzed each year, with AI distinguishing intent from noise.

When a virtual server that had been stable for three years unexpectedly rebooted, the Falcon platform flagged the event as suspicious — not because of the reboot itself, but because it understood the behavior was out of pattern. 

“The platform doesn’t just see what happens; it understands why,” Al Mamari said. “That intelligence eliminates false positives and keeps our analysts focused.”

From zero infrastructure to a world-class, AI-driven operation, Vodafone Oman has built a blueprint for cybersecurity in the modern telecom era. The company’s platform-led, identity-aware, and automation-first approach has made it one of the region’s most advanced defenders, despite its size.

“We protect millions of customers with just four people,” Al Mamari concluded. “With the Falcon platform, we don’t just keep up … we stay ahead.”