At 21 Tbps, reaching new levels of IPv6 traffic!

While setting a new record of 140 Tbps of peak traffic delivered on February 11th, Akamai reached another new milestone in the process: 21 Tbps of peak IPv6 traffic delivered! The global adoption of IPv6 is important to the future of the Internet and Akamai has been committed to helping move IPv6...

DNS Encryption at DNS OARC 32

The DNS DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center DNS OARC is an organization that, in their own words, works to "improve the security, stability, and understanding of the Internet's DNS infrastructure." They hold regular workshops where deployment experts, software developers, researchers, a...

Online Holiday Shopping followed the Hot Topics of 2019: Mobile & Security

Here's what I learned this past holiday season: I'm not alone shopping on my mobile device on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. And while Hollywood actors may take the holidays off, threat actors certainly do not. Let's have a look at some of the numbers. Akamai has a lot of data, but let's look at...

ARE YOU LEAVING YOUR SECURITY BACKDOOR OPEN?

Gartner predicts that enterprises will spend $96 Billion on cyber security this year, up 8% from their spend in 2017. That's a big chunk of change. To put it into context, that spend is in the same ballpark as the individual GDPs of Venezuela, Sri Lanka and Puerto Rico in 2018. Despite this,...

Platypuses and Policies: Akamai's Approach to the GDPR and Information Security

Written by Meyer Potashman On May 25, 2018, the EU General Data Protection Regulation GDPR went into effect. In preparation, Akamai, like every other company that does business with or interacts in any way with individuals in the EU, needed to re-evaluate our approach to data protection and priva...

WannaCry: What We Know

On Friday, May 12, news agencies around the world reported that a new ransomware threat was spreading rapidly. Akamai's incident response teams and researchers worked quickly to understand this new threat and how to mitigate it. This blog post is a summary of what Akamai knows at this point...

Integrating mPulse’s Beacon API with EdgeWorkers to Visualize All Client Requests

Akamai mPulse combines with Akamai EdgeWorkers to visualize any client request and uses its http-request module to let users send their own requests...

Investigating the resurgence of the Mexals campaign

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The “PhoneHome” DDoS Attack — Everything You Need to Know

A vulnerability in enterprise collaboration suite MiCollab by telecommunications company Mitel has been abused for distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks with record-breaking amplification potential...

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...

Dogged Persistence -- The Name of the Game for One DDoS Attacker

With DDoS, we typically observe a moderate degree of attacker persistence. DDoS attacks are relatively easy to launch from a number of online booter services, and the availability of cryptocurrencies for payment has made it easy to remain anonymous. Attackers can try their hand at DDoS for little...

Mind the Gap: Securely Embracing the Digital Explosion

State and local governments are weathering a digital explosion. The move to "virtual everything" means that greater amounts of information are being produced and transmitted electronically, but the digital infrastructure powering these operations is straining under the weight. This shift is...

Akamai Platform Update: New Security Enhancements That Intelligently Automate Application and API Security, Mitigate Online Fraud, and Reduce Burden on Security Professionals

Today is Day 2 of Akamai's Platform Update. Yesterday, we talked about the acceleration of modern app development and how we're empowering users to shift more compute and data to the edge. From the core to the cloud to the edge, the applications and APIs that power modern web experiences must als...

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...

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...

Distinguishing Among DNS Services Part 2: The Economics

This is Part 2 of a 3-part blog series highlighting some of the distinguishing aspects of Akamai's DNS services, Edge DNS and Global Traffic Management. Part 1 focused on Akamai's DNS platform and what sets it apart. In Part 2, we take a closer look at the economics of DNS pricing models and why...

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...

Greening the Digital Economy

COVID-19 and related quarantine protocols have pushed the world even more online than it already was. Global energy consumption for all things digital has been increasing by about 9% per year between 2015 and 2020, and is tracking to be responsible for about 8% of greenhouse gas GHG emission by...

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...

Making the Most of SPS Secure Consumer: Go To Market Best Practices

Seeing opportunities as residential internet services have been transformed into business internet services, ISPs and Mobile Network Operators MNOs are making moves to use the power of their networks to protect customers. As they progress through the decision and deployment cycles, we often get...

The Internet Didn't Break. Now What?

Even though it was only November, it seems like an eternity ago that Akamai CEO Tom Leighton discussed the then-forthcoming "streaming explosion" on Variety's "Strictly Business" podcast. Tom spoke with Variety Co-Editor-in-Chief Andrew Wallenstein about the upcoming launches of streaming service...

Akamai Improves Global Delivery Performance

As part of Akamai's ongoing investments in improving delivery performance, last month we completed the worldwide deployment of the Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT BBR TCP congestion control algorithm across our Edge Platform. The BBR algorithm is designed to help improve the reliability and resilien...

Inspecting TLS Web Traffic - Part 1

In this series of blogs I'm going to talk about how the continued move towards all web traffic being encrypted has impacted enterprise security. In this blog I'm going to focus on the basics - what is encrypted web traffic and how can you proactively control this. TLS encryption is the de-facto...

Enterprise Threat Protector as a Security Enabler in 2020

In the early 2000s, security was mostly focused on perimeter separation between the trusted corporate internal network and the untrusted everything else. Separation was very clear, as most corporate applications were inside the perimeter and users were office based, with a very low amount of remo...

October Release: Q&A with Ari Weil

Shortly after Akamai announced the October 2019 Release with new features and capabilities across its security, performance and media product lines, Akamai's VP of Product Marketing, Ari Weil, took over Akamai's Twitter account for a live October Release Q&A. For those that missed the live event,...

Go Live! Addressable, Ad-Supported, Live Video At Scale

Live streaming poses a unique set of challenges and online audiences can only be monetized to the extent that they remain engaged. From an advertising perspective, the viewing experience between your live content and the ads needs to not only be seamless, but also highly targeted in order to...

Accelerating Your Zero Trust Security Transformation with Enterprise Threat Protector

The basic concepts of zero trust security are relatively simple: trust nothing, verify everything, and maintain consistent controls. But, for CISOs and CIOs charged with transforming their legacy moats and castles architecture to one that allows their enterprises to embrace all of the benefits of...

Summer SOTI - Web Attacks

Continuing Changes Welcome to the second blog post for the Summer 2018 State of the Internet / Security. If you've read the SOTI / Security report before, much of what you see here should be familiar, though the time frame we're looking at is the six months from November 2017 to April 2018, inste...

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...

Are you ready for the holidays?

It's November, which means the holiday season is upon us and retailers are working tirelessly to get their websites, apps and infrastructures ready to deliver a secure and exceptional customer experience during the peak holiday season. If past data is any indication of things to come, 2017 promis...

DDoS Attacks against DNS Infrastructure in the News

DNS-based DDoS attacks have gained mindshare among Akamai customers lately, most recently with last year's Dyn attacks written about on the Akamai Blog here and here and this week's attack against Cedexis. DNS infrastructure is a ripe target for malicious actors hoping to disrupt a digital...

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...

Abusing the DHCP Administrators Group to Escalate Privileges in Windows Domains

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Spoofing DNS Records by Abusing DHCP DNS Dynamic Updates

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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...

Over 25% of Malicious JavaScript Is Being Obfuscated

Last year, Akamai released research on obfuscation techniques being used by cybercriminals to create malicious JavaScript. The code is unreadable, un-debuggable, and as a result, much more challenging to analyze and detect...

What Microsoft Bing’s IndexNow Means for CDN Users

Microsoft Bing today announced the rollout of IndexNow, a new protocol designed in conjunction with Yandex that can allow “websites to easily notify search engines whenever their website content is created, updated, or deleted.” The goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes for search engines...

Zero Trust: The Protection Model for the Post-Pandemic World

One year and a half following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we're seeing most companies either maintaining their remote work policies or slowly moving to a hybrid model. In fact, an estimated 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely by 2025, which is nearly double pre-pandemic levels...

Targeted Cache Control

Content delivery networks CDNs have been around and have evolved over a long time in internet years. They all speak HTTP and you can safely rely on them to work with just about anything else that speaks HTTP. This is the beauty of standards -- HTTP in this case. What you cannot count on is there...

My Path to Akamai

Three years ago, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering Mechatronic from University Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia. I was to be an engineer in the oil and gas industry - but the universe had a better plan for me. Instead, I stepped into IT, providing Technical Support despite my...

Akamai Edge Cloud: Scaling IoT, Part 1

The Internet of Things IoT ecosystem is an exciting emerging market that is disrupting the way we design infrastructure to support businesses. Smart devices, homes, cities, cars, and automation supporting the Industry 4.0 industrial revolution are all placing new demands on existing internet...

Tale of the Tape: Top 5 Reasons Phishing Attacks Haven't Dried Up

One of my favourite websites is archive.org OK, so I'm a nerd. For anyone not familiar with this website, it's essentially a time machine that allows you to go back and look at pretty much any site from a point in time over the past 20-odd years. Recently I came across a story on the BBC website...

Working from Home -- The New Threat Frontier

The emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak dramatically changed and disrupted the normal routines of our personal and professional lives. It led us to stay inside and work from home. It altered our browsing habits from our corporate devices, and it led to increased levels of security risk exposure...

Designing the Smart Experience at Akamai HQ

We are now 90 days out from a major milestone for Akamai: the opening of our new headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The state-of-the-art tower in the tech hub of Kendall Square is particularly exciting for me in my dual roles as CIO and SVP of Global Services & Support, because it marks th...

Phishing Trends Position ISPs to Protect Subscribers

Akamai just released the 2019 State of the Internet SOTI security report: Phishing - Baiting the Hook featuring findings from the enterprise and carrier research teams. They've been collaborating for two years to develop better methods for evaluating massive volumes of anonymized, live-streamed D...

Tailor Video Experiences for Your End Viewers with Manifest Personalization

While the number of online viewers continues to grow, content providers must be able to deliver high quality video streams, flawlessly at scale to meet the demands of these audiences. This is no small task as high volumes of requests often come from various locations, diverse device types and...

Drive Greater Efficiencies in Reaching a Distributed Audience with One-to-Many Delivery

The Challenge: Achieve Consistent Contribution while Maximizing Audience Reach Audiences are becoming increasingly distributed not only from a geographical perspective, but also in the channels viewers use when consuming live content. Content providers need a solution to efficiently and easily...

Threat Identity...The First Line of Defense

Last quarter, we discussed zero trust and identity in regard to remote application access. This focus was primarily looking at enterprise users seeking to gain access to applications on a network where there are no boundaries: The internet. In the concept of zero trust, the internet is considered...

Make way for HTTPS - Starting July 2018, Google Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as "not secure"

Days of clear-text HTTP, the original but insecure foundation for data communication over the web, are numbered. Over the past few years, Google and others such as the Internet Architecture Board, Mozilla, and Apple have nudged developers to encrypt and authenticate their websites using HTTPS whi...

What to expect for this year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Last year during holidays, US online sales surpassed $122 billion. This represented a 12 percent increase over the previous year. But beyond the overall growth, what's more interesting is that sales at physical stores dropped by 10 percent, the result of ongoing consumer comfort with and adoption...