Lumen automates DDoS mitigation as attacks surge worldwide

Lumen

Emergency activations increase by as much as 1,200% since July

Cybersecurity experts have seen a dramatic rise in sophisticated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in recent months. Downtime from these events cost businesses an average of $221,000, so the speed to react is more critical than ever.

In response to this need, Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) is announcing significant upgrades to its industry-leading DDoS Mitigation Service. These new features – which can now be activated on demand – help customers better protect their essential web-facing assets and applications, and reduce the risk of collateral damage during attacks.

Lumen’s new DDoS capabilities include:

  • Rapid Threat Defense. This software-based, automated detection and response service automatically detects and immediately blocks malicious entities such as DDoS botnets. For customers, this means improved application security and availability – even against newly discovered and evolving threats.

    Rapid Threat Defense leverages threat intelligence developed by Black Lotus Labs – Lumen’s threat research and response team. Lumen runs one of the largest IP backbones in the world, which gives Black Lotus Labs unsurpassed visibility to uncover and block attacks earlier than ever – before they ever reach customers’ applications.

  • Three-Tiered Scrubbing Architecture. Lumen believes that intelligent platforms are more effective at threat mitigation in a data center than capacity-only approaches. To that end, the company has developed a proprietary, three-tiered scrubbing approach that uses next-gen technology to mitigate attacks based on size and complexity. Intelligent routing sends larger, more complex attacks to the larger scrubbers, which ensures customers’ business-critical applications continue to perform – both at peacetime and while under attack.

  • DDoS Hyper. Launched last week, DDoS Hyper is part of the new Lumen digital buying experience, which enables customers to order, configure, and deploy DDoS mitigation services via a self-service portal in minutes.

“Lumen is focused on developing platforms that help customers deploy and secure the applications that power 4th Industrial Revolution,” said Chris Smith, vice president of global security services at Lumen. “We leverage our insights to automate detection and response at a global scale, and this allows our customers to maintain the critical web-facing assets that power their businesses.”

“With the recent spike in DDoS attacks, the speed of response to new attacks is more crucial than ever before,” said Martha Vazquez, senior security research analyst, IDC Research. “Service providers are at a point where they need to speed up response times to stop these advanced attacks from occurring immediately. Having an automated response that can prevent bad traffic from ever reaching the customer is critical, and the ability to instantly spin up a security service rapidly – such as with DDoS Hyper – is beneficial for those who are already under attack or believe one is imminent.”