The Impact of Third-Party Scripts on the Facebook Outage

A lot has already been written about the Facebook outage earlier this week. In case you missed it if that’s possible, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all down for several hours on Monday. Facebook provided an update on the cause of the outage late Monday, citing a...

A/B Testing, Now with EdgeKV

This blog was co-authored by Tim Vereecke, Josh Johnson, and Medhat Yakan This is a blog series about building an A/B test with EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV. Read part one here. In our previous blog, we wrote the base code for our A/B test and stored the data locally. Although this may be convenient fo...

Building an A/B Test with EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV

This blog was co-authored by Tim Vereecke, Josh Johnson, and Medhat Yakan This is a blog series about building an A/B test with EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV. Read part two here. When paired with our new EdgeKV distributed key-value database, the Akamai EdgeWorkers serverless platform gives you the...

Adapting Security to Work Anywhere

"Working from home 2021" was the title of my talk at The Cyber Security Summit in January, and the strikethrough is important...

PART I: Retrospective 2020: DDoS Was Back -- Bigger and Badder Than Ever Before

Never before has the risk of a distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack been higher. In 2020, we saw record-breaking attacks, a DDoS extortion campaign impacting thousands of organizations globally, more emergency customer turnups, and more Akamai customers attacked than any year on record -- an...

Two months of Black Fridays?

Black Friday began in the U.S. as a way to funnel Thanksgiving holiday free time into a day of wanton gift shopping. It later spread globally as a retailer promotional blitz to kick off the holiday shopping season. Enter: Black Friday, 2020 style. In early September, many retailers, including Hom...

Stuck Inside, the World Turns to Online Gaming

In my line of work, we talk a lot about traffic trends. They're usually predictable and based around certain events: a major trailer launch, Black Friday in the U.S, the Olympics. But the COVID-19 pandemic has derailed all expectations for 2020, and has itself become a noteworthy event, driving i...

DDoS Extortion Examination

In terms of the Distributed Denial of Service DDoS landscape, 2020 was almost boring prior to the beginning of August. The excitement from the record peak Gbps and Mpps seen in early summer had worn off, and we weren't seeing...

Akamai and Snyk Partnership Creates a Powerful Combination for In-Browser Script Protection

A web experience begins with the sum of the code you created. But it also includes all the code the user is put in contact with when loading your website. This means the attack surface to monitor for web application software threats is not just your code repositories, but the sum of the assets re...

The Publishing Industry -- Where to Now?

Many of us have spent far more time at home looking at screens to keep up to date with the world than would have seemed possible at the start of the year. In the UK, as with many other countries, the lockdown rules and pandemic response were changing on a near-daily basis, and the 5 PM government...

Keeping Our Kids and Our Earth Safe: Thoughts for Earth Day

This April 22 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, an annual event celebrated around the world to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First celebrated in 1970, it now includes events coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network in more than 193 countries. As we get ready to...

Akamai Attends The Massachusetts Clean Energy Preview with Governor Baker

On January 22 - the day after the 2020 Massachusetts State of the Commonwealth speech - Akamai's Sustainability team participated in a clean energy legislative preview with Governor Baker and Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Theoharides of Massachusetts, Ceres, and other key business...

4 Critical Elements Your Next Security Solution Must Have

Security is essential to the success of any digital business. But there's one thing you can always count on: security-related incursions are inevitable. And the results can be devastating. Security breaches erode trust and damage reputation. As a CIO, CISO, or other security or IT leader, you kno...

What Are Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) And Why You Should Care?

Last time I talked about how a proactive approach to defending against targeted threats using cloud-based recursive DNS and threat intelligence just makes sense. Taking this proactive approach early in the killchain can help mitigate known and unknown threats before any IP connection, file downlo...

Attacking a Macro Security Problem with Micro-segmentation

Ransomware is everywhere. And the shift of workloads to the cloud and employees to work-from-home models has only expanded the attack surface, creating new opportunities for attackers to leverage. Companies need Zero Trust solutions that not only defend against threat actors gaining access to...

Anyone for Alphabet Soup? ZTNA, SWGs, MFA, and More: Lessons Learned from Fed Day CyberThreats 2021

Last week, we gathered a few of the most prominent leaders and experts from every corner of the federal space to talk about all things cybersecurity and digital transformation. Discussions ranged from the move toward Zero Trust Network Access ZTNA, and effectively managing identities and access...

Trusting Locations Bites Us Yet Again

Recently, Microsoft announced the discovery of yet another attack being launched by the now infamous Nobelium group, which has been responsible for numerous successful attacks, including the widespread SolarWinds breach in 2020. Thankfully, this latest attempt was not as impactful as those in the...

Now Available: EdgeKV Distributed Key-Value Store

We're excited to announce the availability of EdgeKV, a distributed key-value store database that enables EdgeWorkers to leverage data stored at the edge when deploying custom code across our serverless computing platform. This solution is fully distributed, meaning it runs in 1,400+ networks and...

Edge DNS Secondary Implementation: Order of Operations for NS Zone and Registrar Records

This article has been updated to include recent industry trends and information about primary implementations. Akamai Edge DNS service delivers edge-based, authoritative domain services for thousands of organizations. These organizations trust Edge DNS to deliver reliable and performant responses...

Inspiring the Next Generation with DigiGirlz

photo courtesy of Microsoft DigiGirlz is an initiative organized by Microsoft to engage girls in technological education and careers. The initiative, which launched in 2000, consists of two main programs: DigiGirlz Day and High Tech Camp. This program has been a cornerstone of Microsoft's communi...

Working Together with Our Customers to Build a Sustainable Future

By now, we hope you've read Monday's and Tuesday's blog posts announcing the release of our annual sustainability report, our sustainability program, and the technical innovation behind it. Whilst it's clear Akamai has made great strides on sustainability, in this blog post I will discuss the...

Redundant, Secure, and Open Short Domains: A Vision for Multi-Provider Apex Domain Aliases to Enable DNS Diversity

One Small Step for DNS, One Giant Leap for the Internet Human nature is to seek simpler and convenient ways to do things. One example is the sometimes onerous task of typing a URL into a web browser's address bar. Since users prefer short, easy-to-remember URLs, an internet trend is to use short...

Akamai Edge Cloud: Scaling IoT, Part 2

IoT has tremendous possibilities to transform our world but will fall short of expectations if the underlying infrastructure cannot support the rapid exchange of massive amounts of information from billions of simultaneous and intermittent connections. Akamai Edge Cloud is designed to enable the...

Media Services Live Features Upgrades to Support Modern-Day Live-Streaming Needs

Media Services Live MSL is Akamai's flagship solution for preparing live streams to provide broadcast-grade streaming quality for our live-streaming customers. MSL provides purpose-built key capabilities with liveOrigin, including ingest acceleration to map encoders to optimal entry points on the...

Akamai: Supporting Development at the Edge

The pressures on application and web development teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences have never been greater than they are at this time. With consumer expectations growing, the ability of developers to deliver fresh, leading-edge digital experiences confidently and at high velocity ...

Getting Sassy About SASE - the Value of Edge Security

As a former Gartner analyst and now a strategist at Akamai, I have had several conversations with CISOs across the world on the topic of 'designing a future-ready security architecture'. The fact that so many CISOs are seeking a newer, and more effective, security model is a sign that the busines...

Innovation Driven by Operational Experience and Engineering Insight Deters NXNS Attacks

DNS and security have had a long and tangled relationship. The DNS has always been an attractive target since it's a network leverage point. At DNS OARC 30 in Bangkok in 2019, Akamai's Ralf Weber did a presentation called DNS Security: Past, Present, and Future It's Not Easy covering numerous DNS...

Getting Insights into the Delivery Path of Media with Breadcrumbs

Problem Definition Media streaming typically involves three main components: a player, the origin, and a CDN. Typically, the content provider owns the player and the origin stack and hence is able to diagnose and troubleshoot issues, but the CDN for the most part is a black box. The player...

Enabling Business Continuity in an Uncertain Global Environment

Today's uncertain global environment has made it an imperative for companies to enable remote access to business-critical applications. In particular, the fluidity and uncertainty of the current global crisis triggered by COVID-19 have accelerated the movement to have employees work remotely...

Security Fundamentals Are Key To Successful Cloud Migration

Earlier I wrote about the importance of patching, or more accurately the importance of transferring the need to patch & the associated risk to someone else by using their cloud security service. While patching definitely falls into the security fundamentals category it remains as relevant as ever...

Find AND Fix First- and Third-Party Issues with the Power of Real Data and Adaptive Performance

It's been well established that there is a correlation between fast digital experiences and positive business results. What users experience on a site has a direct bearing on their engagement and buying behaviour and consequently the overall success of the business. Slow page load times can lead ...

mPulse Timeline - New Impactful Way to Gain Insight From Your mPulse Data

Introducing mPulse Timeline mPulse Timeline is the new interface of events, milestones & alerts, displayed in a simple & impactful format. Timeline is the first feature to be released for the new mPulse interface. It is a great way to showcase key insights in a friendly calendar timeline view,...

Your Users Have Left the Building: Now What?

The dramatic growth of mobile devices, the widespread availability of always-on fast wireless networks, and the rapid adoption of cloud applications have transformed the viability of remote working. Employers are increasingly adopting flex schedules, implementing work from home options, and...

Memcached-fueled 1.3 Tbps attacks

At 17:28 GMT, February 28th, Akamai experienced a 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack against one of our customers, a software development company, driven by memcached reflection. This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September, 2016 attacks that announced th...

How do I know if I'm Secure?

Remember those commercials for excessive cell phone roaming coverage? The ones with clever skits highlighting the end user having no idea that their phone had crossed an invisible border and switched from primary to roaming coverage? Immediately incurring increased costs for calling, texting and...

Winning at Launch Time

Your extraordinary work on game development through concept to crunch, your tireless community building, brand awareness, and engagement all converge on one moment: Launching the game. Is it possible to ever finish building a video game? The longer the dev cycle, the more likely it is you'll run...

Unwelcome Interruptions

Imagine your player's first experience with your game. Finally, after waiting all these years, she's got the game in hand. She tears the cellophane, cracks the case, slots the disc, and . . . "Game is now updating. Please wait." Watching 20 GB load onto a machine is not anyone's idea of fun. I ha...

Dealing with Petya

Akamai is aware of and is tracking the malware threat known as "Petya". Petya is ransomware spread using several methods, including PSexec, Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line WMIC, and the EternalBlue exploit used by the WannaCry family of ransomware. The malware spreads via port 139...

Shadow AI, Rogue Agents, and Data Leaks: A Special Report on Navigating AI Risk

Discover top enterprise AI risks — from shadow AI to rogue agents and data leaks — plus practical CISO strategies in the new Akamai SOTI special report...

Akamai's Commitment to Reliability

For more than 20 years, Akamai has worked very hard to earn the trust and confidence of our customers and partners by developing services that can be relied upon to be available and secure at all times. We have scaled our business to handle many trillions of web requests quickly and securely each...

Embracing Mobile-First for a Secure Office Anywhere

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic, Asavie -- now part of Akamai -- announced a partnership with Nokia's Nuage Networks to enable the Finnish company to resell what is now Akamai Security and Personalization Services SPS, a product designed to enable private network access for mobile devices...

HTTP/3 and QUIC: Past, Present, and Future

You may have seen the announcements over the past two weeks -- the IETF QUIC RFCs have been published! That leads to a lot of questions, depending on how closely you've followed this space. You might be wondering what this means to you, or you might think QUIC has been an established thing for...

Finding the Cracks in the Wall - The Hazard of Single Authentication Factor

The use of authentication factors, one of the most fundamental and well understood concepts in information security, enables secure access to applications, services, and networks. It can affect an enterprise's security posture, however, as the drastic increase in data breaches and system attacks...

The Importance of Feedback Loops with Akamai (Part 1)

The dictionary defines feedback as "The modification or control of a process or system by its results or effects, for example in a biochemical pathway or behavioral response." Let's explore how feedback loops work within Akamai. Feedback involves getting output and inserting it back into the inpu...

What's the point of habitual cookie consent? Analytics?

Last week I read an online post about schoolchildren who are taught in their IT lessons to just accept cookie consent pop-ups when they see them on the screen! That really is the definition of habitual consent. If we think about the intent of consent, it should be informed, unambiguous, and...

Platform Update Highlights for eCommerce

Akamai's October Platform Update offers a ton of new features for our customers across all industries. But if you're an online retailer, you should really be paying attention to improvements to EdgeWorkers and Image & Video Manager, which provide expanded capabilities for creating new microservic...

How to Start Growing and Never Stop

My heritage is Sri Lankan. But, at the age of 15 I moved to France as a refugee, fleeing a civil war. Starting a new life from scratch in France, without speaking French, was certainly an interesting journey. But I was lucky enough to have support from my parents. They lived by the mantra of "whe...

Accelerator Program for Early-Stage Innovations in Water Update: Introducing our Innovators!

This Earth Day, we are excited to announce the first two grantees of Akamai's Accelerator Program for Early-Stage Innovations in Water: the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment ATREE and the Foundation for Environmental Monitoring ffem. The Akamai Technologies India Corporate...

Are VPNs a thing of the past?

Attention world: In 2018, we officially surpassed 4 billion internet users1 - and there are no signs of adoption rate slowing down. Yet the Internet as we know it has only been around since the 1990s. Along with it, different iterations of virtual private networks VPNs have been created and...

Maximize security insights by integrating threat intelligence data from Akamai with your SIEM

Since 2005, when Gartner coined the term, SIEM Security Information and Event Management solutions have grown in importance for the security industry. SIEM solutions provide a centralized view to easily access and analyze security information from multiple sources, and then prioritize mitigation...