Akamai Drives New Standards and Enhances Authoritative DNS and Load Balancing Services

For more than 20 years, Akamai's customers have trusted our global edge platform to deliver their content, secure their web applications, and accelerate end-user experiences. As the basis for our mapping functions, Akamai DNS has always been essential to the reliability and performance of our...

The Financial Implications of Online Video Quality

A single instance of video rebuffering could result in more than $85,000 in lost revenue. That's one of the key findings in Understanding the Value of Consistency in OTT Video Delivery, a new report that Akamai has released in conjunction with MTM, a research and consulting firm specializing in...

Akamai's Adaptive Media Player Advances for NAB 2019, Adding Header Bidding and Ultra Low Latency

Introduction Akamai Adaptive Media Player AMP helps publishers insert quality media playback experiences into web, mobile, and connected-TV applications. Publishers can leverage Akamai AMP for a single, modular SDK that pre-integrates playback, delivery, monetization, and measurement to ensure a...

#OTTuesday: The Current State of Linear Broadcast and OTT

Over the last two years, we've seen a surge in OTT offerings as viewers insist on watching what they want, when they want, on any device, anywhere. Major content creators like Netflix and Amazon have made significant strides to push this technology into the mainstream, however true mass adoption...

From the Core to the Edge: 3 Security Imperatives and the Evolving Digital Topology

The breathtaking pace at which everyone and everything is becoming connected is having a profound effect on digital business, from delivering exceptional experiences, to ensuring the security of your customers, applications, and workforce. Consider this: There are over 20 billion connected device...

Zero Trust Security Protects Businesses while Enabling Growth

Many companies have their own applications, internal domains, and local area network LAN. But when it comes to business applications, organizations are increasingly dependent on cloud-based resources. These may include email servers, customer relationship management CRM software, or other...

Get, Set, Election, Go: Preparing For The 2019 Elections - Chapter Two

Chapter 2: Election Day Challenges and Opportunities for Digital News Publishers It will be all about optimizing for Scale, Performance, and Efficiency while maintaining their security posture ... If 2014 was anything to go by for us at Akamai supporting digital publishers, 2019 is going to be an...

It will take more than web pages that load faster to boost holiday conversion

When designing websites to meet peak traffic demands, it is vital to look beyond basic metrics such as page load speed. Providing visual content optimized for both desktop and mobile devices, and combating security threats will help you drive traffic and improve conversion rates during the holida...

Using Akamai Edge DNS with PCI DSS Environments

Overview The PCI DSS scoping guidance indicates that common shared services that provide services to the CDE, such as DNS, can be in scope and must be assessed for PCI DSS compliance. This post discusses the application of this scoping guidance to the external authoritative DNS servers and provid...

Alternatives to Animated GIFs

We have all been amused by animated GIFs on lots of websites -- dancing babies, cute cats, flying birds, funny memes, and countless others. Despite their popularity, animated GIFs can be very heavy and can contribute significantly to page performance issues. How significantly? We have seen...

REBA and VERGE 2019: Climate Action Through Partnership and Innovation

This October at the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance REBA and Verge conferences in Oakland, California, Akamai had the opportunity to actively engage with 3,000 of our like-minded sustainability peers on making incremental environmental change. To no surprise, I witnessed passionate dialogue arou...

Top 10 Practices for Securing Cloud Workloads

Public cloud is one of the biggest challenges in every IT organization. While driving greater scalability, performance, and access for a competitive edge, it also introduces new security risks. More than just hosted data center infrastructure, public cloud offers the promise of agility, efficienc...

Ramnit in the UK

By Asaf Nadler and Lior Lahav Ramnit is a family of trojans that allows attackers to remotely control infected machines, in order steal personal and banking information 1, and open backdoors to download additional malware 2. Initial versions of Ramnit appeared in late 2011 and infected more than...

Mobile Trends during the US Holiday Weekend

Over the past few years we've seen a tremendous growth in mobile traffic on the web. Because of this many of the most successful websites have invested in optimizing the experience of users on whatever device they use and however they connect to the internet. With mobile traffic now exceeding...

Getting the most out of your branch local connection

In our global world of business, organizations often have multiple branch offices spanning every country. Some of these branches are quite large with their own IT infrastructure and personnel, while some are very small with just a few employees. In the past, these branch offices were connected to...

Akamai + Fingerbank: How an open source community can transform security

Isn't it amazing how seemingly simple decisions can have far-reaching effects? When the Inverse team in Montreal took over PacketFence in 2008, it was an open source OS solution. They recognized the inherent value in keeping it as such. In so doing, they didn't just launch a product--they created...

Ensuring Business Continuity During Peak Times: 6 Recommendations to Optimize Streaming and Download Bandwidth Usage

A sudden and dramatic surge in internet traffic, much of which is driven by video streaming and game and software download events, is testing network infrastructures with unprecedented volume. The 30% increase in global traffic Akamai delivered from the edge during the past month, compared to the...

Will Social Distancing Break the Internet?

First off, no -- the Internet is not going to break! That said, the news media is awash with stories and statistics about how the Internet is faring with the increase in traffic due to isolation protocols forcing daily functions online. Which functions? In my house, we have remote work, e-learnin...

Mobile Device Access Predicted to Surpass Desktop This Holiday Season

By Chris Wraight and Charles Choe The U.S. back-to-school shopping period is a hectic time when parents are busy purchasing items for their children such as pencils, books, electronics and new clothes; back-to-college is just as important and is now tracked separately. According to the National...

Effectively Detecting Low Throughput and Malicious DNS Exfiltration

In a previous blog post, we described how the DNS protocol, mainly designed for hostname to IP addresses resolution, can be abused for arbitrary data exchange. Based on throughput i.e., bytes per hour, we distinguish between two classes of data exchange over the DNS protocol. The first of the two...

DNS Flag Day & Akamai

Written by Jon Reed & Barry Greene DNS Flag Day is an industry event that promotes the adoption of the most up-to-date DNS features and ensures that non-standards-compliant servers don't negatively impact the global performance of the Internet. The 2019 DNS Flag Day will remove a number of...

Singles' Day Blows Away Its Own Records

Singles' Day in China is the world's largest shopping event. Since its beginnings in 1993 at Nanjing University, it has grown to become a national phenomenon. Singles' Day was originally started as a way to celebrate singles and as a protest against couple-centric festivals. The date 11/11 was...

Rise of Credential Stuffing in Asia Pacific and Japan.

The rise of credential stuffing attacks globally is made possible by the tendency of customers' re-using the same credentials across different websites and attackers' easy access to stolen credential lists. Credential stuffing attacks is the result of attackers using stolen credentials username a...

CVE-2022-30216 - Authentication coercion of the Windows “Server” service

In this blog, see how an off-by-one error could lead to domain controller access in Microsoft Server Service...

How to Verify Adaptive Acceleration Features are Working on Browser

As we know, Adaptive Acceleration's umbrella consists of the below features: 1. Automatic Push/Preconnect 2. Resource Optimizer 3. Automatic Font Preload 4. Script Management To read more about these features, please refer to Akamai Community. Now let's see how we can validate if these features a...

DataStream - The Real World Benefits of Real time Logging

Beijing Summer Olympics, 2008 - I remember the butterflies in my stomach as I saw Michael Phelps touch the wall to win his 7th gold at 100m butterfly. It was a record time of 50.58 but everyone was biting their nails because the difference between winning and losing here was only a hundredth of a...

Packet Pacing Benefits for Midgress Traffic

Akamai's Smooth Delivery Pacing SDP made an impression last year by increasing client network performance while simultaneously reducing retransmissions. If you missed the details and want to learn more about SDP, please check out our past discussion. In this article, we'll explore if SDP's benefi...

Protect Your Network From Malware

There are two types of companies: Those who have been hacked, and those who don't yet know they have been hacked1 With data breaches frequently making the news and causing panic among network administrators, the above statement by former Cisco boss John Chambers in 2015 certainly doesn't seem...

Deliver secure digital experiences using Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform - Part 2

In the first part of this blog series, we discussed how you can leverage Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform, the world's largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform, to achieve the scalability, availability, reliability and performance needed to deliver superior digital experiences and maximize...

Enhancing video streaming quality for ExoPlayer - Part 2: ExoPlayer's Buffering Strategy, how to lower startup time, and how to lower rebuffering for video on-demand

Co-Author: Mark Greve, Engineering Manager at Akamai. Part of the Media Client Team The first part of this blog series discussed about the quality of user experience QoE metrics and two strategies that heavily influence the QoE: the bitrate selection strategy and the buffering strategy. In this...

State of the Internet, Volume 5, Issue 1

Is it too late to still say "Happy New Year?" We don't think so. We're kicking off 2019 with our first issue of the State of the Internet / Security. Goal setting is something that security teams around the world are doing right now. What are your team's goals? How do your goals align with the...

G2A's Journey to Global Growth, Part 1: Keeping Gamers and Geeks Playing During a Pandemic

G2A.COM is the world's largest marketplace for video games, with thousands of sellers, 24 million customers, and a million transactions a month. It's the first stop for gamers and geeks who are looking for low-priced game keys, activation codes, electronics, merchandise, and more. G2A has grown...

Three Cloud-First Akamai Initiatives to Support Your Cloud Journey

61% of organizations plan to focus on cloud migration this year. 93% have a multi-cloud strategy.1 This means that on average your organization is using 2.2 public clouds, multiplying your complexity and your costs. While the cloud has delivered on a lot of promises, it isn't getting simpler or...

Fighting Smoke with Open Source

I'm a developer advocate at Akamai and a huge proponent for the open source initiative. So, today I am going to tell you a story of how a regular person like you or me can make an impact with just a little bit of goodwill, and a pinch of open source. Early morning on August 16, around 2,500...

The Phishing Industry

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, phishing attacks are now being created and executed on an industrial scale. Malicious actors are increasingly using highly sophisticated off-the-shelf phishing kits that allow them to deliver very targeted, short-lived attacks. These campaigns direct victi...

Akamai Takes Home Three Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards

Streaming Media has announced its 2018 Readers' Choice Award winners at Streaming Media West in Huntington Beach, Calif. Recognizing technological excellence in the online video industry, Streaming Media readers cast more than 25,000 votes across 30 categories. Akamai was honored to win in three...

Picture perfect: How to drive the best shopping experiences with the right images

This article originally appeared on Internet Retailer. There are several key variables that retail marketing and web teams should consider when delivering high-quality images for engaging online shoppers. The quality, format and size of an image must all be considered to ensure that vivid images...

What's New in Edge Delivery

Welcome to day two of the Akamai Platform Update! Today, we're focusing on Akamai's edge delivery products as well as other complimentary products that help drive great digital experiences. The last several months have been nothing short of unprecedented as lockdowns, quarantines, and other...

What’s a 10? Pwning vCenter with CVE-2020-3952

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TOP 10 BEST PRACTICES FOR SECURING CLOUD WORKFLOWS

Cloud migration is a double-edged sword. While promising greater scalability, agility, and even new approaches to applications, it also introduces complexity--which means more security risk. Security vulnerabilities exposed in breach after breach have highlighted the risk that comes with the clou...

Software Defined Perimeter - a Modern VPN with Traditional Challenges

Application Servers are implemented as a means of providing services and making resources available to users. However, any server connected to the Internet is inevitably targeted by malicious users using open listening ports. There are millions of these ports on the Internet, which means there is...

Targeted Security Attacks Impact Holiday Shopping

Part 2 - Security In the first post, web performance was discussed, especially for the mobile visitor. While web performance is critically important, security is also a vital area of focus and investment because, threat actors don't take holidays. They're always out on the internet probing sites,...

Zero Trust Security Architectures - Software Defined Perimeter

By Jano van Deventer and Andrew Terranova This is Part 3 of a 5 part blog series. Jump to Part 1: Introduction Jump to Part 2: Network Micro-Segmentation Jump to Part 4: Identity Aware Proxy Jump to Part 5: Akamai's Approach to Zero Trust Introduction In the first part of this blog series, we...

DNS is a Unique (and Necessary) Security Control

Like many other security professionals, you have been reviewing your security stack, reading up on the latest security trends, and have perhaps recently attended Info-Sec, RSA, Black Hat or some other relevant conference. Along the way, you may have seen messaging for recursive DNS rDNS as a...

Part 1: Reading SPAM for Research

I recently wrote an article for Information Security Magazine where I explained how internet security researchers could use their spam folders as a resource tool. It got me thinking about going into greater detail on what I've found in my inbox. Phishing Sites I noticed an increase in "free gift...

Cookies, Single Sign-On, and You

What's the problem? As part of a concerted effort to protect end user privacy and increase browser security, major web browsers have been making changes to their treatment of 3rd party cookies. These changes are designed to cripple ad targeting services that track user behavior online and rely on...

As Predicted, Mobile Continued eCommerce Dominance Over the Holiday Weekend

Akamai predicted in September 2018 that mobile shopping would continue its growth this holiday shopping season. That prediction held true as we saw mobile devices increase their share of Black Friday online shopping traffic volume to 57.55%, with desktop traffic dropping to 35.91%. And for the...

Architectural paths for evolving the DNS

The Domain Name System DNS is one of the Internet's fundamental systems, providing the top-level hierarchy for naming Internet resources. One of its purposes is to act as a sort of phonebook, allowing names such as "www.example.com" to be resolved to resource information, such as server IP...

Akamai EAA Impersonation Vulnerability - A Deep Dive

In this post, we cover the technical details of CVE-2021-28091, the vulnerability impacting Akamai's Enterprise Application Access EAA platform...

As the 2020 Holiday Season Approaches, Optimized Digital Experiences Are Vital for Retailers

This article originally appeared in Digital Commerce 360. The most effective digital retail will happen in step with everyday life. Retailers must invest in tools and infrastructure needed to balance consumer expectations with regulatory responsibilities -- and focus on serving customers. Overall...