CenturyLink opens its first S-E Asia security operations centre in Singapore

US-HEADQUARTERED communications and data services player CenturyLink has launched its first security operations centre (SOC) in South-east Asia in Singapore on Thursday, to address the growing needs of enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region to handle cybersecurity threats

With the 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 said in a statement.

It also aims to build upon the cybersecurity talent pool in Singapore and around the region.

The Singapore centre is the telco's second in Asia after India. It operates six other SOCs globally in locations including Denver in the US and London.

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.

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.

In its 2018 Threat Report, CenturyLink findings showed that China, South Korea and Vietnam are the most popular targets of malicious cyber activity in the Asia-Pacific. CenturyLink also found China, South Korea and Japan to be the top targets of C2s in the region.

The company's latest move builds on its existing operations in Asia. It already has three dedicated operations centres, three DDoS scrubbing centres, four cloud connect locations and eight content delivery network (CDN) locations in Asia.

Said Francis Thangasamy, CenturyLink's Asia-Pacific vice-president of product management: "CenturyLink has had an operations centre in the Asia-Pacific since the early 2000s to serve our customers' growing demands in scaling their digital businesses. With the launch of our SOC in Singapore today, enterprises are better protected through our comprehensive methodology of people, process and technology to tackle an ever-evolving threat landscape and help secure their digital futures."