SingTel and FireEye are investing US$50 million in the next five years to set up two operations centres and train professionals in Asia-Pacific to fight off increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on governments and companies.
The deal, revealed this morning, will involve operations centres set up in Singapore and Sydney – next to SingTel’s network operations centres – to better monitor threats. They will work with FireEye’s existing three centres in the United States and Ireland.
The Asia-Pacific centres will combine the intelligence from SingTels’ network traffic in the region with the threats that FireEye monitors globally, said SingTel’s chief executive for group enterprise, Bill Chang.
The first centre will be open in Singapore early next year, he told Singapore reporters in a teleconference from the US this morning.
The sharing of intelligence is key to providing a managed defence service that SingTel and FireEye hope to sell to governments and big corporate customers in the region, after several high-profile attacks in the US as well as Asia.
Last week, JP Morgan disclosed that 76 million households were affected by a sophisticated cyber attack in the summer. In Singapore, 300,000 customer accounts were exposed last month after an apparent breach at karaoke chain KBox.
As part of the deal, FireEye will also send some of its experts with experience combating the biggest worry now – advanced persistent threats – to Singapore and Sydney – to train as many as 150 professionals.
The cyber security firm uses online sensors – essentially virtual machines – in networks worldwide to detect infected computers “calling back” to command and control servers run by cyber criminals.
This, it argues, is more effective in combating attacks today, which are targeted at individuals in a company and are often not caught by traditional security software that looks for known threats.
The aim is to cut down the time it takes to find a potential attack, which could involve malware that lies dormant and undetected for more than 200 days on average, revealed FireEye today. It also said companies can recover more quickly from an attack.
