CenturyLink Increases Cybersecurity Capabilities Post-Level 3 Buy

CenturyLink‘s acquisition of Level 3 Communications is proving to boost the former’s security prowess.

CenturyLink now monitors more than 114 billion netflow sessions and 1.3 billion security events per day, responding to and mitigating roughly 120 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks daily, and removing about 35 command and control (C2) networks monthly. Netflow is used for collecting IP traffic data, while C2s are used by attackers to maintain communications with compromised systems within a target network.

CenturyLink’s Chris Richter

Chris Richter, CenturyLink’s vice president of global security services, tells Channel Partners that prior to the integration of the legacy Level 3 network, Level 3 monitored more than 94 billion netflow sessions per day, responding to and mitigating roughly 100 DDoS attacks daily and removing roughly 25 C2s monthly. This expanded visibility allows CenturyLink’s customers to better anticipate and protect against threats, he said.

“With the expansion of CenturyLink’s threat visibility, partners and end customers benefit from CenturyLink’s ability to see more threats and stop more attacks before they become large scale, business impacting events,” he said. “This enhanced threat awareness feeds into the company’s comprehensive portfolio of security services.”

CenturyLink’s cloud-based Adaptive Threat Intelligence offering 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 content-delivery network providers associated with potentially malicious IP addresses. These features provide enterprises with insight to bolster their cyberdefenses, the company said.

“It’s hard to protect against unseen threats,” Richter said. “Cybercrime continues to grow as a profitable shadow industry, and as a result, actionable threat intelligence has never been more important to effective cybersecurity. CenturyLink’s expanded visibility can help enterprises across all industries and verticals to predict, protect and respond to evolving cyberthreats.”

According to IDC, as organizations become increasingly distributed, and migrate applications and data to the cloud, networks are growing more critical. Unfortunately, as networks and endpoints expand, so do security vulnerabilities. The security environment is no longer static, so organizations must “evolve to keep up with a rising number of threats that are harder to detect with traditional security solutions,” it said.

CenturyLink will gainmore cybersecurity capabilities from the Level 3 purchase, Richter said.

“As CenturyLink continues to integrate the complementary security portfolios of both legacy companies, we expect to have some exciting announcements to share in the coming months,” he said.