On 17 January 2019, CenturyLink launched its first security operations centre (SOC) in South-east Asia in Singapore, to address the growing needs of enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region to handle cybersecurity threats. The Singapore centre is the telco's 2nd in Asia after India, and it operates 6 other SOCs globally in locations including Denver in
the US and London.
With the Singapore facility, the company aims to offer its enterprise customers in the region a greater ability to predict, protect and respond to internal and external threats through CenturyLink's network-based security solutions. It also aims to build upon the cybersecurity talent pool in Singapore and around the region.
CenturyLink security operations centres monitor over 114 billion NetFlow sessions, which provide the ability to collect Internet protocol (IP) network traffic as it enters or exits an interface daily. The centres respond to and mitigate about 120 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks per day.
In addition, CenturyLink also tracks over 5,000 command and control servers (C2s) daily and removes more than 35 C2s each month. Cybercriminals can use such servers to send commands to systems compromised by malware and receive stolen data.
Mr Ang Chin Tah, Director of Infocomms and Media at the Singapore Economic Development Board said that CenturyLink security operations centre will augment the growing pool of cyber security companies anchoring technical capabilities in Singapore. He added, “the centre will create opportunities for Singaporeans to be upskilled in relevant industrial skillsets, such as incident analysis, management and response, and threat intelligence.”
