Summary: Case study on how Technologie Hlavniho Mesta Prahy (Technology of the Capital City of Prague) secured its vast network of street lighting, smart traffic systems, and public infrastructure with Whalebone Immunity for seamless, multi-layered cybersecurity protection.
The city-owned company Technology of the Capital City of Prague (TCCP) keeps the metropolis glowing: it manages all 136,000 street lamps, bathes landmarks in light, and operates the smart traffic lights and cameras that keep Prague’s streets safe.
Each lamp post is becoming a smart hub that saves energy, monitors traffic and will soon charge electric vehicles – delivering light, oversight and innovation through a single network now also secured by Whalebone Immunity.
As a provider of municipal infrastructure, the company has long pursued a multi‑layered defense that protects both network traffic and its users. “Our requirements for the new product were mainly good integrationwith existing systems, easy maintenance and little impact on the work of TCCP employees,” describes Security Analyst Karel Vyhlídka.
According to Vyhlídka, “The main objective of deploying Whalebone was to filter internet traffic so that content deemed inappropriate from the perspectives of security, information protection, legislation, and company regulations would be blocked.”
Whalebone Immunity met the demands for rapid deployment and trouble‑free integration into the existing infrastructure.
The IT team first deployed it in pilot mode, which lasted three months, before moving it into full operation. “Except for the need to add some domains to the whitelist, there were no significant problems during deployment,” describes Karel Vyhlídka from TCCP.
Whalebone is deployed across the entire network: “Our network, now protected by Whalebone Immunity, is an APN containing several buildings and other devices such as smart stops or devices for displaying digital advertising,” explains Karel Vyhlídka.
Administrators appreciate the easy integration with internal systems: “The integration with Active Directory was very simple, it was a matter of two, three clicks and it works. ”
According to Karel Vyhlídka, this allows for an easy identification of problematic behaviour of individual users: “We evaluate user behaviour every week. We can now simply see what problems an employee creates and we can talk to them about it.”
“We use a firewall, but we have Whalebone set a little more aggressively. We can see it captures 30–50 % more threats,” said Vyhlídka.
The product complements other security tools in the network well, as Karel Vyhlídka states: “To ensure cybersecurity, we use several other systems that perform both filtering and evaluation of network traffic and security on endpoint devices.
Whalebone Immunity integrates well with these systems and seamlessly complements the whole mosaic of cybersecurity.” The occurrence of false‑positive detections is also minimal. If it happens, the domain can simply be whitelisted. Alternatively, Whalebone analysts can be contacted to verify it. TCCP actively use other features of Whalebone Immunity as well, such as alerting on homograph attacks, content filtering or identity protection. Vyhlídka added, “We also plan to deploy Whalebone Home Office Security for portable devices so that they are protected even when accessing the internet outside our core network.”
In the end, Whalebone Immunity is an essential protection layer. “Whalebone Immunity brings us another layer of protection – this way, we are increasing the chance that no one will encrypt our data or that we will not find them somewhere on a foreign cloud,” said Vyhlídka.