In today’s digital age, cybersecurity is a top priority for businesses across all industries. The ever-evolving threat landscape, characterized by sophisticated cyberattacks, demands robust and proactive security solutions that can effectively defend against these incessant attacks.
Enter Lumen Defender℠ powered by Black Lotus Labs®, a cutting-edge threat defense tool designed to fortify your network perimeter and safeguard your business from internet-based threats. Lumen Defender is tailored to address the critical challenges faced by customers and the industry at large.
Understanding the Cybersecurity Landscape
Before we delve into the specifics of Lumen Defender, it’s crucial to comprehend the current cybersecurity landscape. Cyberthreats are becoming more sophisticated, with attackers employing advanced tactics to breach defenses. Businesses are grappling with increasing incidents of data breaches, ransomware attacks and other malicious activities that can cripple operations and tarnish reputations.
According to a recent survey conducted with IDC, 86% of respondents indicated that their organizations experienced more cyberattacks compared to the previous year, and 92% reported that the cost increased by more than 10% year over year due to cyberattacks.1
The survey also highlighted key challenges faced by organizations’ cybersecurity programs:
- 42% struggle with real-time monitoring and threat detection
- 37% find it difficult to hire and retain skilled cybersecurity professionals
- 34% face issues maintaining visibility across expanding attack surfaces1
As organizations plan to strengthen their cybersecurity infrastructure, the top security outcomes desired are risk reduction (55%) and faster time to detect or respond to attacks (54%).1
Lumen Defender: Solving Industry Challenges with Near-real-time Threat Detection
Lumen Defender aims to help your business safeguard its infrastructure by proactively blocking internet-based threats before they can infiltrate your network, protecting it from the most disruptive threats. It also provides you with a comprehensive overview of the threats targeting your infrastructure, enabling you to make informed decisions on how to address other potentially malicious activities.
By providing you with this additional layer of visibility into the threat landscape, you can gain a greater understanding of the importance of bridging common security gaps, like providing real-time monitoring and threat detection, maintaining visibility across expanding attack surfaces, and properly monitoring and managing your cybersecurity tools. Lumen Defender enables companies to take strides toward achieving top security outcomes by mitigating and reducing risks—and quickly detecting and responding to attacks.
Black Lotus Labs® and Lumen Defender
Lumen Defender is powered by threat intelligence from Black Lotus Labs. Who is Black Lotus Labs, you may ask? Black Lotus Labs is the Threat Research and Operations arm of Lumen, made up of data scientists, reverse engineers, security engineers and threat analysts who specialize in detecting, tracking and disrupting threats around the world.
Black Lotus Labs leverages direct access to the Lumen internet backbone—on the #1 peered global network2—to identify and track the hosts and infrastructure malicious actors are using. This unmatched network visibility allows Black Lotus Labs to see far more data and network activity than traditional threat researchers, monitoring daily:
- 200+ billion NetFlow sessions
- 1 billion DNS queries
- 3 million threats
- 46,000 C2 servers
This massive volume of data enables the team to identify patterns of malicious behavior, providing high confidence in their threat validation. This research is used to train advanced detection and machine-learning algorithms to perform automated threat validation for high-fidelity intelligence, which feeds into products like Lumen Defender.
Lumen and Black Lotus Labs are at the forefront of identifying sophisticated threats that were previously unknown to the industry. We stand out as a leader in the cybersecurity field, with Lumen recently being awarded the CyberSecurity Breakthrough Award for 2024 Threat Intelligence Company of the Year. This accolade highlights our exceptional work in the crowded cybersecurity industry, where we consistently demonstrate our ability to help protect businesses and maintain the integrity of the internet, particularly through the efforts of Black Lotus Labs.
Lumen has also been recognized in Newsweek’s America’s Best Cybersecurity Companies 2025, further showcasing our unwavering commitment to innovation, transparency and the relentless pursuit of securing our customers’ digital ecosystems.
Proactively Defending Your Businesses from Malicious Threats
Lumen Defender brings the power of Black Lotus Labs to your fingertips with advanced threat intelligence to automatically block traffic from known internet-based threats before they infiltrate your network. By leveraging Black Lotus Labs intelligence, Lumen Defender can help stop sophisticated threats that other protection mechanisms may miss.
We recently announced the release of Lumen Defender Plus, which offers more advanced features and customization options, allowing you to set up custom parameters for severity-based blocking, create custom allow, deny, and monitor lists, view detailed reporting, and set up end-user alerts, enabling you to proactively manage and respond to threats with greater precision and control.
Both tiers of Lumen Defender, Essentials and Plus, are integrated with our Lumen® Internet On-Demand (IoD) service and can be turned on and managed in our customer portal with no additional actions needed once activated. Simply select Lumen Defender, and its automated, zero-touch enablement and provisioning will protect your business from threats while providing near-real-time insights.
The solution includes a dashboard and reporting tools that deliver actionable intelligence, enhancing responsiveness to potential threats. This heightened level of control helps your security teams quickly address detected abnormalities and implement specific security policies.
IDC wrote about our recent launch of Lumen Defender Plus, saying:
The Importance of Properly Monitoring and Managing Cybersecurity Tools
When implementing a new cybersecurity tool, it is important to understand how it works with your existing security tools. We often get asked the question, “Does this replace my firewall or DDoS mitigation solutions?” The simple answer to this is “no.” We believe the most effective approach to protecting businesses’ assets is a multi-layered one.
The diagram below shows an overview of how Lumen Defender can work alongside DDoS mitigation and customer firewalls to orchestrate a comprehensive defense strategy.
Lumen® DDoS Mitigation stands at the forefront of protecting systems from volumetric attacks that inundate networks with excessive traffic. Once these volumetric bots and reflectors are scrubbed and rerouted through normal pathways, Lumen Defender seamlessly takes over, automatically blocking internet-based threats—such as bots, proxies, malware, phishing attempts, command-and-control (C2) communications, and scans—before they can breach your environment.
By swiftly identifying and neutralizing sophisticated and varied cyberthreats, Lumen Defender can help significantly reduce the frequency of persistent cyberattacks targeting the customer edge. This helps to alleviate the strain on the firewall, allowing it to perform more efficiently and effectively. The firewall complements Lumen Defender by enabling advanced traffic filtering, such as blocking unsupported applications, unused ports and unauthorized users, providing precise control over network access and security. This multi-layered approach empowers you with integrated defense, fortifying your network against evolving cyberthreats while optimizing security performance.
Safeguard Your Business Against the Unknown
Lumen Defender offers a robust and comprehensive solution to safeguard your business from the ever-evolving threat landscape. By leveraging advanced threat intelligence and real-time monitoring, Lumen Defender helps ensure that your network remains secure and resilient against cyberattacks.
With its customizable features and seamless integration with existing tools, Lumen Defender empowers your security teams to quickly address detected abnormalities and implement specific security policies.
Learn more about how to see clearly, defend proactively and operate simply with Lumen Defender.
1 IDC, InfoBrief sponsored by Lumen: The New Cybersecurity Equation: Risk, Response, and Business Outcomes, Doc #US53083025, February 2025.
2Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), AS Rank, January 2025.
3 Scott Tiazkun, IDC Link: Lumen‑Going All Out to Be the Affordable Threat Detection Leader, Doc #lcUS53341125, April 2025.
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