Bill Swearingen Director of Cyber Defense CenturyLinkBill Swearingen has 15 years of experience in information security and the protection of critical infrastructure from advanced cyber threats. Bill’s technical expertise and understanding of the inherit risks corporations face today has given him a unique ability to build strong cyber defenses to detect, degrade, or disrupt cyber threats. Bill has a proven track record of creating, developing, and managing strong technical teams needed to provide Incident Response, Digital Forensics, Vulnerability Assessment, Penetration Testing, and Policy enforcement for large (Fortune 150) corporations such as CenturyLink and Sprint.
Bill is the Director of Cyber Defense for CenturyLink, the third largest telecommunications company in the United States and a recognized leader in the network services market. CenturyLink is a global leader in internet service provision, cloud infrastructure, and hosted IT solutions for enterprise customers and governments. CenturyLink provides data, voice and managed services in local, national and select international markets through its high-quality advanced fiber optic network and multiple data centers for businesses and consumers.
Over the past few years, Bill has focused on reduction of Mean Time to Detect through the continuous development and improvement of real-time alerting on cyber events utilizing Open Source, privately shared, and internally developed threat intelligence; external partnerships, and Incident Readiness Exercises (IREs) that simulate real attacks on the CenturyLink infrastructure.
The Cyber Defense team is spread across the United States; with members located in Monroe, LA, Denver, CO, Washington D.C., St. Louis, MO, Minneapolis, MN, and New Century, KS (where Bill is located).
