CenturyLink is enhancing its cybersecurity capabilities by offering business customers expanded visibility into global threats, a move that further incorporates the security capabilities the service provider gained from its acquisition of Level 3.
Purchasing Level 3 put CenturyLink’s cybersecurity view into a new bracket. CenturyLink now monitors over 114 billion NetFlow sessions and 1.3 billion security events per day, responding to and mitigating roughly 120 DDoS attacks per day and removing approximately 35 command and control (C2) networks per month.
The service provider said that having this heightened visibility enables customers to better anticipate and protect against threats.
Having this greater level of threat awareness will complement the service provider’s growing portfolio of security services, including its Adaptive Threat Intelligence, a cloud-based solution offering customers customized threat intelligence and alerting backed by CenturyLink’s global IP backbone.
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By leveraging the service provider’s expansive view of the global threatscape to make continuous improvements to its Adaptive Threat Intelligence machine learning algorithms and verification techniques for improved threat scoring and custom threat sets, CenturyLink Threat Research Labs allows enterprises to stay abreast of new and evolving threats.
CenturyLink’s Adaptive Threat Intelligence includes enhancements such as the ability to identify traffic originating from anonymous proxy networks, as well as improved threat scoring, fidelity and classifications for web hosting and CDN providers associated with potentially malicious IP addresses. The service provider said that these features provide enterprises with actionable insight to bolster their cyber defenses.
IDC said in a report (PDF) that the role of managed security solutions from service providers like CenturyLink will become even more relevant as businesses move forward with their digital transformation (DX) initiatives. By the end of 2017, IDC said that two-thirds of the CEOs of Global 2000 enterprises would have DX at the center of their corporate strategy. Further, by the year 2020, 50% of the Global 2000 will see much of their business depending on their ability to create digitally enhanced products, services, and experiences.
The research firm said that this is because as businesses “undergo technology changes influenced by digital transformation (DX), networks are becoming more exposed and vulnerable to security threats and attacks.”
But by using a network-based security approach, businesses can get the protection from a range of known and unknown cyberattacks.
“Network-based security solutions can reduce a threat before it reaches the organization's systems,” IDC said. “For example, in the event of a DDoS attack, a network-based security solution can provide immediate protection by rerouting the malicious traffic coming into a scrubbing center and then having the legitimate traffic sent without any interruption. In addition, network-based services such as spam filtering can block users from connecting to bad URLs from malicious sites.”