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...

Layered Security Without the Layered Complexity

With the recent influx of news reports regarding security incidents, more Chief Information Security Officers CISOs, Chief Information Officers CIOs, and IT professionals are reviewing current security infrastructures, policies, and practices to identify potential weaknesses in their security...

Akamai Prioritizes People Safety and Continuity of Service during Hurricane Irma

Written by Mani Sundaram, SVP Global Services & Support; Francis Trentley, VP Security Services & Support; Roger Barrango, Director Global Security Operations. Hurricane Irma affected millions this week. As always here at Akamai, taking care of people comes first, and the wellbeing of our team wa...

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...

Recursive DNS - The Achilles Heel Of Advanced Threats

We all know what happens whenever anyone or anything tries to access a resource on the Internet. It all starts with a DNS request that translates a URL www.akamai.com into an IP address 104.97.77.24: Now if we dive a little deeper into the DNS request flow we can see the requester make a request ...

Location- and Device-agnostic Security for the Mobile Workforce

I've spent my entire career in technology and can still recall the time when a desktop PC was the only way to work. Truth be told, I'm also old enough to remember dumb terminals. I also remember my first company laptop -- a beast of a thing with a monochrome display so thick it came with an...

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...

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. After a massive shift away from common workspaces in response to the global pandemic, there is no more working remotely or working from home, there is just working. The...

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...

Compromised enterprise devices detection based on abnormal behavior patterns-- UEBA in action

Recently, many reports of incidents have been making headlines, proving that no business or industry is immune to advanced threat actors. Applying user and entity behavior analytics UEBA for the challenging task of the detection of compromised devices over time can play a critical role in...

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...

A new skimmer uses WebSockets and a fake credit card form to steal sensitive data

A new skimmer attack was discovered this week, targeting various online e-commerce sites built with different frameworks. As of the writing of this blog post, the attack is still active and exfiltrating data. Attackers are exploiting an expanding in-browser attack surface and continually evolving...

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...

Is 97% Network Traffic Offload Interesting?

Sports, gaming, and other live events have the potential to overwhelm network capacity due to the sheer volume of traffic generated when large numbers of viewers or gamers engage. These "peak" events may only occur once a month or even once a year sports championships, election results, gaming...

PSD2 and Open Banking -- The New Way to Work Your Money

The main question behind the Payment Services Directive PSD2 and Open Banking: Is it innovative or just platitudes against competition? Open Banking allows a third party to perform certain acts with your financial institution on your behalf, such as enacting a payment or reviewing your spending...

Residential Internet Connections are now Business Connections: What about Security and Compliance?

Near-global mandates to stay at home have completely reshaped the internet security landscape. Remote work is the new normal, inverting the traditional office model. Attackers are not relenting as they see opportunity to take advantage of a world with a singular focus. Here are a couple of recent...

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...

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...

Best security practices for Trusted TLS Intermediary

According to Google over 75% of public websites are accessed over encrypted connections using HTTPS, with the use of HTTP diminishing. As expected, the bad actors are following the crowds, and using HTTPS to hide their activities. So how can security solutions such as ETP Threat Protector detect...

HTTPS+TLS and IPv6-enablement both in the majority for World Cup streaming

The underlying protocols of the Internet continue to evolve, and massive events such as the World Cup are a great opportunity to see this in action. A single-match peak for live video streaming of 22.5 Tbps was set on Akamai on Tuesday July 10 during the semi-final in Russia between France and...

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...

Trusted access to Wordpress /wp-admin for content Authors

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as a full content management system, and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. One of the main challenges I have seen with customers is to provide secure access to /wp-admin or /wp-login.php to...

Akamai, Mirai, & The FBI

Through the end of 2016, and throughout 2017, multiple Mirai-based botnets targeted multiple Akamai customers. The very first Mirai attack against Akamai was a multi-day barrage, weighing in at a peak of 620/Gbps that sent shockwaves across the Internet. The same botnet would go on to conduct...

Advanced, Targeted Threats: What do They Mean for Your Bottom Line?

Too often, we are so focused on our day-to-day that we neglect to consider the bigger picture. I have been writing about recursive DNS and threat intelligence, Domain Generation Algorithms DGAs, and DNS-based data exfiltration assuming that the vast majority of readers are familiar with the...

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...

Analyzing a Go-Based IoT Self-Propagating DDoS Botnet

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Learning from the LockBit Takedown

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Abusing the DHCP Administrators Group to Escalate Privileges in Windows Domains

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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...

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?...

Cyberweek 2020 Attracted Both Online Shoppers and DDoS Attackers

As we close out 2020, it should come as no surprise that Cyberweek the week of Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday proved big for DDoS attacks. Threat actors were out in force during this key shopping season, and they shifted their sights toward disrupting digital commerce-related industries. This...

Streaming Traffic Peaks on Election Night

Preliminary data shows live news streaming traffic peaked at approximately 18 Tbps on Akamai's Intelligent Edge platform during coverage of the U.S. Presidential Election on November 3rd. That's roughly 5X greater than traffic on a typical day and more than double the 7.5 Tbps peak we observed...

5G, Security, IoT, Asavie and Akamai

Malicious actors never seem to rest and have always worked remotely. That simple realization hit home during recent global events. Specifically, Akamai saw an increase in malware traffic of over 400% between March 9, 2020 and May 11, 2020 from corporate devices, most of which were being used...

Akamai Named Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Fourth Consecutive Year

Gartner published its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls WAFi and named Akamai a Leader for the fourth consecutive year. Gartner's high distinction is market recognition of our completeness of vision and ability to execute. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a...

Unprecedented Levels of Ransom DDoS Extortion Attacks

The FBI has released a flash warning that thousands of organizations around the world, and across multiple industries, have been threatened with DDoS attacks unless they pay a bitcoin ransom. This ransom DDoS, or RDoS, threat was covered by Akamai's Security Intelligence Response Team SIRT in a...

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,...

Election Readiness 2018

2018 is a pivotal year for the integrity of our electoral process. The threat to the digital infrastructure of our elections is proliferating to a level that has not been seen before. Officials are working tirelessly to protect your vote by proactively identifying vulnerabilities and targeting...

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...

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...

Akamai Wins with Live OTT at NAB

The latest version of Akamai's Media Services Live streaming solution, featuring the addition of new liveOrigin capabilities specifically for live and 24/7 linear OTT video delivery, earned two awards at last week's 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. Streaming Media named it one of its six "Best of NAB"...

Magecart Attack Disguised as Google Tag Manager

Magecart skimmers constantly evolve. Recent attacks aimed at stealing sensitive customer information illustrate the need for comprehensive security solutions...

PCI DSS v4.0: Meeting Emerging Needs for Script Monitoring and Management

PCI DSS v4.0 makes Akamai Client-Side Protection & Compliance essential for any customer that processes or transmits cardholder data...

Akamai Accelerator Program: Technological Solutions for India’s Water Crisis

Akamai’s India Corporate Social Responsibility CSR Trust is helping to tackle this major challenge. In accordance with the country’s CSR mandates, the trust allocates 2% of the branch’s revenue to CSR programs. Its flagship initiative is the Akamai Accelerator Program, which supports innovators w...

DNS Cybersquatting: The Case for Edge DNS Zone Protect

Cybersquatting, also known as domain squatting, is a type of scam that mimics a brand's domain to confuse potential victims and gain their trust. According to Revision Legal, “Cybersquatting is prohibited in the U.S. by federal law under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act ACPA.” These...

Attack Campaigns Ramp Up for Organizations Down Under

DDoS and AppSec attacks impacting the ANZ region Australia and New Zealand have been in the headlines of late, with several high profile companies seeing prolonged outages and leading to speculation as to whether the region is being specifically targeted? Let’s take a closer look at the types of...

Defeating the Pirates

In Akamai's paper, "Inside the World of Video Pirates," we discovered why digital intellectual property theft aka "piracy" is possibly the most misunderstood form of cybercrime facing the TV, sports, and film industries. The paper explored how piracy strategically impacts the industry, how the...

Don't Risk Getting Caught by Kr3pto Phishing Kits

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Can Edge Computing Exist Without the Edge? Part 2: Edge Computing

In part 1 of this series, I drew the architectural distinction between a centralized cloud platform and a distributed edge network. This is an important foundation upon which to explain the difference between cloud computing and edge computing. The two serve very different and complementary...

Understanding New Image Formats

Akamai Image & Video Manager IVM already supports key modern image types, such as WebP, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR, but the imaging industry is always evolving and raising the bar on the balance of compression and quality. In addition, creative and development teams are regularly asking about new...

The Importance of Listening

Akamai has been a leader in customer service for years, and we've leveraged that experience to best support our customers through the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes our internal customers, our employees who are working hard to do their jobs while adjusting to a full-time remote environment. Thi...