CenturyLink has created a network-based automated threat detection and response system that it says will help protect its customers' network traffic and block security threats. Called Rapid Threat Defense, the security system was developed by CenturyLink’s threat research unit, Black Lotus Labs.
The company created Black Lotus Labs about a year ago to protect its customers from ongoing security threats. CenturyLink says it does this by tracking and disrupting botnets and malware.
The ILEC says it tracks 3.6 million threats per day, and feeds more than 139 billion NetFlow sessions into its machine learning models every day to help identify malicious traffic.
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Rapid Threat Defense can be used by customers to specify and set policy-based threat criteria that will then make it possible to automatically block malicious IP addresses at the firewall or block a malicious domain through the DNS.
CenturyLink also said that the Rapid Threat Defense security platform will reduce the workload of security incident responders, and will provide a seamless experience instead of requiring customers to integrate a bunch of disparate security systems.
The company plans to integrate this security system with its managed premises firewall service and its SD-WAN platform later this year.
CenturyLink itself has been a victim of a data breach through its cloud platform. Last October the company revealed that its customer information database of 2.8 million records had been exposed for 10 months. At the time, the company said the information compromised was primarily just contact information and not financial or sensitive information.