Large, Complex DDoS Attacks on the Rise in 2020

While we've highlighted both record PPS and BPS attacks mitigated on the Akamai Prolexic Platform over the past few weeks, these attacks are part of a broader trend of increasingly large and complex DDoS activity. We have seen clear indications across the industry of high-water mark DDoS attacks...

Accelerate SVG Delivery with Ion (A2)

As of March 2020, all Akamai Ion customers will benefit automatically from the more powerful Brotli/Zopfli compression algorithm for delivering their SVG files. The benefit of fewer SVG bytes is a positive impact on your visual performance KPIs First Meaningful Paint, Time to Visually Ready,...

Preparing for Disruption with Good IT

As our colleagues, customers, and friends continue to adapt to the rapidly changing situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are facing a global challenge that is unprecedented in the age of technology. The most important thing during this time is the health and safety of our communities. In orde...

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...

Zero Trust Security Architectures - Identity Aware Proxy

By Faraz Siddiqui and Andrew Terranova This is Part 4 of a 5 part blog series. Jump to Part 1: Introduction Jump to Part 2: Network Micro-Segmentation Jump to Part 3: Software Defined Perimeter Jump to Part 5: Akamai's Approach to Zero Trust Introduction In the first part of this blog series, we...

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...

Akamai and Duo have announced a technology partnership for Zero Trust

Akamai continues to build a zero trust ecosystem by integrating it's Enterprise Application Access EAA with Duo's Multi-Factor Authentication MFA solution. Duo now natively integrates into EAA and augments access with push-based MFA, phone call delivery of MFA tokens, and additional device level...

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...

Akamai MFA in Action: Single Sign-On is Phish-Proof and Simple to Use

Breaking news: we just completed an 850-user pilot with Akamai MFA. In this blog, the first in a series, I’ll explain why we switched to Akamai MFA, how we ran our pilot, and employee feedback so far. Check back for my next blog, when we’re midway through our global deployment. A burglar checks f...

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...

Understanding Emerging Video Formats

In my previous post, we discussed two new image formats: High-Efficiency Image File HEIF and AV1 Image File AVIF. In this article, we'll take a closer look at two emerging video formats built on the same foundations. Akamai Image & Video Manager IVM already supports the key video codecs H.264,...

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...

Partnering with Microsoft on Hackathon 2020 and Saving the Planet

During the week of July 27, thousands of participants from around the globe participated in the Microsoft 2020 Hackathon. In its seventh year -- and this year, fully virtual -- the annual worldwide event brings Microsoft employees and interns together to drum up new ideas, create change, and make...

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...

South Korean Data Protection Laws

I am a Senior CIAM Solution Engineer. While doing research to prepare for a client conversation, I discovered a number of International Data Protection laws that are less talked about than GDPR or CCPA, but are important considerations for global brands. To help you better navigate the complex...

Akamai Prolexic - Mitigating Large Scale DDoS Attacks in 0 seconds

Large scale multi-vector DDOS attack thwarted in 0 Seconds A recent large attack levied against one of our global online gaming customers highlights the value of Akamai Prolexic's 0 Second SLA. As attacks ramp up more quickly than ever before, Akamai's SOCC demonstrates every day how having a...

Yin and Yang of the Zero Trust Model

It may seem strange to apply concepts from Chinese philosophy to an IT security model, but representing complex ideas in simple terms can be a powerful tool for understanding and communicating. By viewing zero trust through the lens of Yin and Yang, we see that to be complete, the scope of the...

Passing the Online Torch from Rio to PyeongChang

Lighting the Olympic flame marks the beginning of the Olympic Games, commemorating the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus, and connecting the Games to its predecessors. The lighting ceremony has provided some of the Olympic Games' most iconic moments, such as Muhammad Ali...

Don't Say Goodbye to Your OTT Viewers

Takes a second to say goodbye Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh It takes a second to say goodbye Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh, say bye bye Where you going to now When U2 penned the lyrics to its song, "Seconds," in 1983, there was no such thing as online video. In fact, video had killed the radio star only four...

20 Years of DNS Data Exfiltration: Why, How, and What's Next?

In the last few posts, I talked about why recursive DNS rDNS combined with threat intelligence makes for such a simple-to-deploy security solution that effectively mitigates and prevents advanced, targeted threats. Not to belabor the point, but the recent punycode phishing news makes the...

Exploitation Observed: Ivanti Connect Secure — CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887

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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...

Your Employees Want Passwordless. Isn't It Time You Gave It to Them?

I hate passwords. There, I said it. I dread getting an email from Akamai IT telling me it will soon be time to update my password. I procrastinate until the last possible moment instead of immediately doing what is actually a trivial process. I suspect I'm not alone in my dislike for passwords. T...

How Akamai Employees Showed Up for Akamai Earth Month

Photo from an Akamai employee who took her bike out to enjoy nature during Akamai Earth Month. Akamai employees across the globe showed up in full force for Akamai Earth Month 2021 -- our campaign to help employees take small actions at home and in their community to make a difference for the...

Better, or More Effective?

A colleague asked me to share my thoughts on building a "better team". I confess, I stumbled on the word "better". Better than what exactly?...

Command Injection on a D-Link Router

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to extend the local WiFi in my home to reach all the floors. The goal was to have full connectivity from every location in the house...

Akamai Enhances its Cloud Secure Web Gateway with DLP, Application Control and DNS over TLS (DoT)

Last March, Akamai announced the launch of its secure web gateway delivered at the edge, to help enterprises further accelerate their transition to a new security architecture based on Zero Trust and secure access service edge SASE principles. As we now know, we were just on the cusp of a global...

Akamai Named to India's Best Workplaces for Women

By Mani Sundaram, CIO and EVP, Global Services & Support & Prasad Mandava, Managing Director, India, & the Akamai India Leadership Team Akamai recently received the honor of being named one of the Top 50 Workplaces for Women in India by Great Place to Work. They evaluated over 850 organizations...

Working Together to Manage Global Internet Traffic Increases

As businesses and consumers around the world adjust their routines amid the various COVID-19 restrictions, the internet is being used at a scale that the world has never experienced. In addition to millions of people who are now working from home, students all over the world are going online to...

Akamai Enhances Enterprise Threat Protector to Add Secure Web Gateway Capabilities

Today, Akamai announced that it has added secure web gateway SWG capabilities to its Enterprise Threat Protector ETP service to help enterprises further accelerate their transformation to a Zero Trust security architecture. So what are the SWG enhancements and what benefits will these deliver for...

Simplifying the ISP Transition to DNS Encryption

New protocols to encrypt DNS traffic, DNS over HTTPS DoH and DNS over TLS DoT, have been a visible Internet topic for the past two years. Akamai participated in the definition of DoH/DoT standards and recently released support in the high-performance CacheServe resolver. Major features include:...

Who is doing what on your network?

Over the past few months, while talking to customers, the topic of Zero Trust Architecture keeps coming up. Seemingly everyone is thinking of implementing the model - which we fully encourage! One of the core components of the principle is the ability to inspect and log all network and system...

Why Zero Trust Needs the Edge

Backhauling traffic destroys performance, and backhauling attack traffic can destroy even more. Nevertheless, in a traditional security deployment model, we are faced with the lose-lose options of either backhauling all traffic to the security stack or allowing some accesses to not go through the...

Don't Risk Getting Caught by Kr3pto Phishing Kits

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Gambling, Streaming Traffic Up During Men's College Basketball Tourney

Baylor wasn't the only big winner in the 2021 men's college basketball tournament. Gambling industry-related web traffic delivered by Akamai jumped 31% over the category average for all of Q4 2020 on March 31st. That was the day after the field of four finalists - Baylor, Houston, Gonzaga and UCL...

Act Against Geopiracy with Enhanced Proxy Detection

Widespread Use of Location Spoofing to Circumvent Territorial Content Restrictions Is the image below relatable? According to the description, the service is a VPN desktop application and proxy browser extension that helps viewers mask their physical location, circumvent censorship, and restore...

Smartphones are not the problem with MFA security

We've recently seen big attacks play out on prominent technology companies despite their use of smartphone-based multi-factor authentication. These attacks are real, they do happen, and it appears that even the smartphone cannot protect us anymore. While this conclusion may be tempting, it actual...

Distinguishing Among DNS Services Part 1: The Platform

This is Part 1 of a 3-part blog series highlighting some of the distinguishing aspects of Akamai's DNS services, Edge DNS and Global Traffic Management. To begin the series, we focus on Akamai's DNS platform, which was the subject of a technical paper presented at SIGCOMM 2020 this past August. O...

HTTP/3: Ready to Land

Hi, my name is Mike Bishop; I'm the editor of the newest version of HTTP, HTTP/3. I'm part of Foundry, a team at Akamai that focuses on new and emerging technologies that will impact the future of the web. I've been involved in web standards since the early days of HTTP/2, and most of my work has...

Back-to-School Shopping in 2020?

When I was a kid, back-to-school shopping was a really big deal. My mom and I would head out to the local T.J. Maxx and spend hours hunting for bargains on clothes, a backpack, a lunch box, and other "necessary" school supplies. We always hit the Friendly's next door after our shopping excursion,...

20 Years of Edge Computing

How long will you wait for something? That depends on what you're waiting for, of course. But in your daily interactions, think about how many "things" you interact with where you expect the response to be instantaneous - tapping on mobile apps, logging in and transacting with a retailer or a ban...

Manage Origin Offload and Egress Fees for Live and On-Demand

Origin offload has received more attention in the past few years as more customers have moved their origins to the cloud. As such, the cost to access data has become an important issue. To support this move, Akamai has developed Cloud Wrapper to provide customers with a way to securely connect to...

How You Get There Matters: "Middle-Mile" RUM to Drive CDN Strategy

Traditional RUM products make use of APIs Navigation-Timing, Resource-Timing, etc. built into browsers to help measure the performance characteristics of the loading of a web page. That is, they do their best to quantify the work required by the browser when rendering a web page. APM products use...

Introducing Web Security Analytics

Every security team knows that the success of any security product relies heavily on the ability to maintain an optimal security configuration. Any misconfiguration can result in malicious or undesired traffic reaching the application, or worse - legitimate traffic being blocked. In addition, it...

Choosing the right application access solution for a hybrid IT world

This Guest blog was written by Martha Gomez Vazquez, a Senior Research Analyst for IDC's Infrastructure Services research practice focusing on Security Services and Hardware & Software Support and Deployment. The widespread success of security breaches over the past few years has proven beyond a...

Game Crunch Doesn't Always Have to be a Thing

You've been dreading the conversation. You know there's no way out of it, given the timeline. Your execs have made it clear that the very large marketing spend is going to hit during the week when two of your engineers were planning to be on vacation. You've got a brilliant team that has helped y...

The State of the Internet: A Decade of Change

The State of the Internet Report is growing up - with this issue, it enters its tenth year of publication. Over time, it has matured in many ways, including its length, design, and the content it includes. Looking back at that first issue all 17 pages of it, for the first quarter of 2008, we find...

Tokyo Streaming Traffic Runs Rings Around Rio

Written by: Cory Sakakeeny With 35 medals at stake, the last full day of competition during the games in Tokyo generated the highest video streaming traffic for 30-plus customers on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. Medal matches for baseball, basketball, and soccer, along with several track...

The Threat That Never Went Away Is Back (with a Vengeance)

What is your recollection of May 2017? Emmanuel Macron won the French election. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus gave its final performance after a 146-year run. The U.S. FCC voted to overturn net neutrality rules. And the National Health Service in the United Kingdom was crippled by...

CISA Emergency Directive 21-03: VPN Vulnerabilities Actively Exploited

On April 20, 2021, the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA released an alert on the exploitation of Pulse Connect Secure Vulnerabilities with Alert AA21-110A: Exploitation of Pulse Connect Secure Vulnerabilities, as well as Emergency Directive ED...