CenturyLink® Puts Focus on Cyber Security after a Big Acquisition

CenturyLink^® recently said that the company now has an accountability to make sure it can prevent cyber attacks, toward their customer base, that comes from the public internet. Following the acquisition of Level 3 Communications^® last year, CenturyLink^® has improved the visibility into traffic throughout their large network.

“We do a lot of work to keep the internet running and protect the internet not as a service, but we have to act as good stewards of the internet because we control and see so much of it,” said CenturyLink’s Vice President of Global Security Services, Chris Richter. “We believe that all network service providers should do what they can within the realms of economic feasibility to protect the internet. For that reason, when we know there’s bad actors on our backbone using our infrastructure, we want to keep it as clean as we possibly can, which is what compels us to take down the 35 bot net organizations every month we do.”

The acquisition of Level 3 Communications^® has improved the cyber security capabilities of CenturyLink^®, which the company achieved by offering their business subscribers upgraded visibility into cyber attacks. The acquisition has enabled the fastest internet provider to monitor more than 114bn NetFlow sessions as well as 1.3bn security events and respond to and mitigate around 120 Distributed Denial of Service attacks each day, and remove roughly 35 command-and-control networks on a monthly basis.

CenturyLink^® has enhanced NetFlow infrastructure in order to facilitate collecting data concerning the company’s network traffic into threat analysis engines. Note that Level 3 Communications^® has done that in their network prior to being acquired by CenturyLink^®. Henceforth, enhancing NetFlow infrastructure proved to be a smooth one for CenturyLink^®. “It was fairly straightforward to do,” Richter said. “All we had to do was make the additional investment in the new collectors and direct that NetFlow information to our Threat Intelligence Labs where the collectors are and adjust for a lot more information.”

“This was something that the legacy CenturyLink^® customer base had been asking for,” he said referring to business customers of the Telco giant. “When they heard about what the legacy Level 3 portfolio offered, they wanted that level of visibility and granularity on the CenturyLink^® side.”