Lumen Beefs Up DDoS Mitigation Service with Automation

Lumen Technologies has enhanced its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Mitigation Service to combat the surge in attacks in recent months.

The new features can be activated on demand. They help customers better protect their web-facing assets and applications. Furthermore, they reduce the risk of collateral damage during attacks.

Chris Smith is vice president of global security services at Lumen.

“DDoS attacks target business-critical applications that face the internet and drive interactions with a customer,” he said. “Think e-commerce sites, gaming, financial trading sites, health care sites, etc.”

Lumen’s Chris Smith

DDoS attacks target a variety of businesses, Smith said.

“From medium-size companies, to some of the largest brands on the planet, to public-sector agencies, if they do business on the internet, they can be vulnerable to DDoS attacks,” he said.

The new capabilities include:

Costly Downtime

“DDoS attacks are meant to impair or take down an application that faces the internet,” Smith said. “They do this by flooding the application with nuisance traffic — making it unusable by the end user. This leads to significant costs for the business in the form of downtime, remediation costs, reputational damage, etc. One report cited the cost of downtime alone averages more than $200,000.”

DDoS service upgrades enable Lumen and its partners to mitigate attacks much faster, he said.

“Given that we mitigate more than 140 DDoS attacks every single day (51,000-plus each year), and we’ve seen emergency DDoS activations increase by a whopping 1,200% since July alone, it’s clear that DDoS attacks are a real-time, global problem,” Smith said. “For our customers, DDoS protection means their applications continue running – and their businesses continue moving forward – despite the malicious actors who are out there taking advantage of someone else as we speak.”

“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 at IDC Research. “Service providers are at a point where they need to speed up response times to stop these advanced attacks from occurring immediately.”

CenturyLink rebranded its enterprise business to Lumen earlier this year.