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...

Climbing the Ladder: Zero Trust, Single Sign-On, Multiple Applications

It is understood that there is a significant amount of complexity to securing today's enterprise, especially as more services and applications move to the cloud and a Zero Trust security model is employed. We at Akamai are actively engaged in helping enterprises adjust to a Zero Trust security...

3 Reasons Your Business Needs Security at the Edge

As a security professional, no one knows better than you that the attack surface is shifting and continues to expand across an ever-widening area. Our interconnected digital lives are wreaking havoc with the idea of "the perimeter." As digital attacks continue to grow in size and volume, and are...

Mobile Window Shopping Climbs, But Sites Are Still Failing Users

This Diwali we saw mobile usage increase 24% over 2018, at the expense of desktop and tablet devices, as mobile shoppers continued to research before buying, even while in a store. At the same time, bounce rates increased, which means shoppers were likely dissatisfied with their experience and...

Client Side Threats & How Could Website Owners Mitigate Them?

Have you ever browsed a website with complete confidence that your data is protected? We tend to trust websites with some of our most valuable assets, such as personal information or credit card data. While owners of these websites might consider the protection of our data a top priority, we stil...

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...

Girls Who Code: That's a Wrap!

The Summer Immersion Program for Girls Who Code at Akamai wrapped up this past week. The girls finished their final projects and presented them at a graduation ceremony attended by friends and family as well as supporters and mentors from Akamai. The girls were divided into five teams for their...

Massive Campaign Targeting UK Banks Bypassing 2FA

On 14 July, 2020, Oliver Hough, a security researcher from Cyjax, published a report centered on a phishing campaign targeting banking customers in the United Kingdom, which evades two-factor authentication 2FA...

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...

Prevent Access to Unauthorized Viewers with Enhanced Proxy Detection

Background: Geo-Blocking Content There are no hard and fast rules to the way content is licensed throughout the world, but typically content owners develop license agreements at the country level which gives them a fair amount of flexibility when monetizing their content. These license agreements...

Don't Risk Getting Caught by Kr3pto Phishing Kits

Akamai's threat research team recently published a report showing that a new phishing toolkit named Kr3pto was targeting UK banking customers. A phishing kit is an all-in-one software package that lets just about anyone create and launch phishing attacks designed to steal user data by posing as a...

Understanding CCPA: It's Time to Action a Plan for Compliance

Notice to all procrastinators: The final countdown to the California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA has begun. On January 1, 2020, companies or organizations that do business in California will be required to comply with the state's strict new privacy legislation that establishes a legal and enforceab...

Simplifying Security Configuration: A UX Revamp Retrospective

With the March 2019 Release update, the Security Configuration User Interface UI evolution is now complete, and we hope it integrates more seamlessly into your online business. Over time, Akamai has added new products, features, and functionality to its security solutions to protect your web...

AnswerX - Akamai's 'Secret' DNS Platform

As I work with Operators all over the world, I'm amazed at two worrying. First, Operators are still treating DNS as an afterthought. Everyone knows that if DNS is down, the network is down. Too many people are taking DNS's resiliency for granted. DNS "just works" is assumed to be norm until it do...

The Benefits of a Single Provider DNS Platform

I've written in previous blogs about the value of using DNS as a security control point and how using a DNS based security solution like Akamai's Enterprise Threat Protector can help accelerate your transition to a Zero Trust security approach. In this blog, I'm going to cover how in addition to...

Akamai's Innovation and Collaboration In Renewable Energy

The energy footprint of the IT sector is estimated at 7% of global electricity consumption, according to Greenpeace International. And, although the data center and colocation industry is a small segment of the IT sector, it represents a large portion of its power consumption. By 2020, the power...

A Look Back At The DDoS Trends of 2018

As mentioned in the 2018 Year in Review State of the Internet / Security report, trends in DDoS are remarkably stable. The size of the largest attacks have grown by approximately 6% on an annual basis, with occasional outliers like the Mirai botnet. The median size of attacks has been much more...

Managing Thousands of users in Hundreds of branches with a few clicks

We live in a global business world. Almost on a daily basis, we see organizations expanding rapidly across geographies. While businesses in every industry can have international sites, some verticals like banking, finance, education, and retail are more apt to have corporate offices in multiple...

How's that Security Back Door Doing? (Part 2)

In the first part of this blog post I wrote about how recursive DNS rDNS is an attack surface that many enterprises don't currently protect. Bad actors are exploiting that fact and developing advanced targeted threats that use DNS to bypass conventional security tools such as firewalls, secure we...

On Cache Poisoning

In March 2017, Akamai released a post, "On Web Cache Deception Attacks". A presentation at the Black Hat conference by James Kettle from Port Swigger on web cache poisoning has recently raised awareness of cache poisoning. This is a class of vulnerability with a long history. Cache poisoning can ...

Beyond the Looking Glass - The OTT Evolution in India

India, while at the cusp of becoming a digital, mobile first country, is also in the middle of evolving content consumption patterns. Hotstar's India Watch Report states that the video consumption in the country has seen a five-fold growth in just one year, with most of this growth is fuelled by...

The WireX Botnet: An example of cross-organizational cooperation

Introduction On August 17th, 2017, multiple Content Delivery Networks CDNs and content providers were subject to significant attacks from a botnet dubbed WireX. The botnet is named for an anagram for one of the delimiter strings in its command and control protocol. The WireX botnet comprises...

EAA Client Escalation of Privilege Vulnerability on Windows

This post covers the details of CVE-2021-40683 CVSS 6.5, the vulnerability impacting the Akamai Enterprise Application Access EAA Client running on Windows systems, for which Akamai has provided a patch to its customers...

Don't reward your loyal customers by treating them like criminals!

I am CIAM not IAM Imagine shopping in your favourite wine merchant or checking in to the brand of hotel that you afford the most loyalty, and at the point of self-identification either to prove age or verification security is called over and you are frisked. Not a great experience. Would you...

Firefox DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and Enterprise Threat Protector

Recursive DNS communications are normally unencrypted between a client and a resolver. In an effort to improve user privacy and address security concerns, Mozilla announced it would begin enabling DNS over HTTPS DoH by default in its Firefox browser. However, Mozilla recognized it would be...

Amazon Prime Day is Now a Major Holiday, Driving up Traffic by More Than 14% in the U.S.

For the just-completed Amazon Prime Day a full 48 hours this year, published reports indicate that it was the largest shopping event in Amazon's history, exceeding their own 2018 sales for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. And this year, there were more than 250 other retailers that...

Does Zero Trust Security Have to be Hard to be Effective?

The short answer is no. As expected, the long answer is a little more nuanced. But first, a quick refresher on Zero Trust security for those who haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet. For those who have, feel free to skip the next section. Zero Trust Security Recap We know that the defensible netwo...

Get the message: Your shopper data is trying to tell you something

This article originally appeared in Internet Retailer As we head into the thick of the holiday shopping season, web teams must make sure the path from discovery to purchase is as easy and painless as possible. Knowing where potential fail points are ahead of time makes it easier to prepare, while...

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Malware?

Every year, tens of thousands of mergers and acquisitions M&A take place across every industry and vertical. In fact, "In 2017, companies announced over 50,600 transactions with a total value of more than 3.5 trillion USD."1 Not only is M&A complex from a business sense, it also brings the...

Passive HTTP2 Client Fingerprinting - White Paper

HTTP2 is the second major version of the HTTP protocol. It changes the way HTTP is transferred "on the wire" by introducing a full binary protocol, made up of TCP connections, streams and frames, rather than simply being a plain-text protocol. Such a fundamental change between HTTP/1.x to HTTP/2,...

A Shortcut to Coercion: Incomplete Patch of APT28's Zero-Day Leads to CVE-2026-32202

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Have Web Trust Issues? Bot Management Can Help

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Smart DNS for the New Network Edge: Emerging Requirements for DNS Encryption

This blog post -- the fourth in a series -- will discuss how smart DNS resolvers can enhance ongoing ISP and MNO network transformation efforts, such as the transition to 5G, better integration of Wi-Fi, and new network designs that optimize the edge to improve service delivery and network...

How to Provide Secure Access to AWS Workloads

In the last two posts, we covered the security fundamentals to migrate to the Cloud and the 10 best practices to secure workloads. In this third post, we will talk about securing access to your AWS workloads. To Live Happy, Live Hidden In a traditional model, you need to somehow open your cloud...

What's New in Security - March 2019

Today, Akamai announced the March 2019 Release with new features and capabilities across its security, performance, and media product lines - with a focus on helping customers better manage their cloud migration initiatives. Within security, Akamai has made updates to every product line to help...

The Dark Side of APIs: Part 1, API Overview

Ryan Barnett, Principal Security Researcher, Akamai Elad Shuster, Senior Security Researcher, Akamai API Overview Application Programming Interfaces API are a software design approach which enables software and system developers to integrate with other systems based on a defined set of...

The days of VPNs are numbered

We have been talking about how it's time to re-evaluate giving full access to the corporate network for some time. In fact, Akamai's Sr. Director of Enterprise Security & Infrastructure Engineering talks about one of his core goals--No VPN--here. Over the last few days, I am sure many teams who a...

Let's Get Visual: Best Practices for Digital Image Management

"Offering rich, interactive images has emerged as a critical component to any website or web app visitor engagement strategy -- and with good reason," wrote Parag Pathak, our Senior Product Marketing Manager, in his recent published article - Let's get visual: best practices for digital image...

Zero Trust: Not As Scary As It Sounds

If the term Zero Trust has been popping up in your news feed with astonishing frequency lately, you may be tempted to think that Zero Trust must be a brand-new technology cooked up in a research lab at MIT and powered by the latest artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, and...

The evolution of MFA authentication technology and what needs to change next

Authentication attacks are big business, and no one is immune from them. In fact, two men were recently arrested and charged in the Twitter employee account compromise that happened in July 2020. Using employee account credentials, the attackers took over several highly visible celebrity Twitter...

Security at the Edge - What is Gartner's SASE & why does it matter?

Recently, Gartner published a report called "Market Trends: How to Win as WAN Edge and Security Converge Into the Secure Access Service Edge" that dives into how to enable security and network access controls as-a-service from the cloud. But what is Gartner's SASE pronounced like "sassy"? The...

Beware of Fall Phishing Season

A recent blog post by LinkedIn says there are more available job postings listed in October than any other month. Since 89% of the hiring managers who spoke to LinkedIn said it takes less than four weeks to fill those roles, there is a limited window of opportunity - for both job seekers and...

Distinguishing Among DNS Services Part 3: Investment and Innovation

This is Part 3 of a 3-part blog series highlighting some of the distinguishing aspects of Akamai's authoritative DNS services, Edge DNS and Global Traffic Management. Part 1 focused on Akamai's DNS platform and what sets it apart. Part 2 focused on the economics of authoritative DNS pricing model...

Working From Home. So Far, So Much Learned.

Hello all! I'm Nicole Fitzpatrick, Deputy General Counsel at Akamai. I also sit on the D&I Executive Steering Committee. Normally I'd be in our Cambridge office about now, but like so many of us I am working from home and writing this surrounded by four kids, the dog and my husband not written in...

COVID-19 Phishing: Exploiting a Global Pandemic

It's sad to think criminals are hard at work taking advantage of the extraordinary stress the world's population is currently experiencing. But they are. New phishing scams exploiting anxiety about COVID-19 are trending upward. Akamai's Carrier Data Science and Threat Research teams analyzing...

Trust As The Foundation Of Security

Our customers are moving more workloads to the cloud. No surprise there. The siren song of agility, scale, and cost savings can't be resisted. But as we highlighted earlier, security fundamentals are key to a successful cloud migration. In fact, we also shared marketectures to successfully migrat...

CHAPTER 3: ELECTION DAY - BEST PRACTICES AND READINESS CHECKLIST FOR DIGITAL NEWS PUBLISHERS

CHAPTER 3: ELECTION DAY - BEST PRACTICES AND READINESS FOR DIGITAL NEWS PUBLISHERS As the 2019 General Election results approach, the frenzy and anticipation continue to build. Digital news publishers have the opportunity to engage with audiences on their digital properties as users go online to...

Introducing New RUM-based Website Performance Benchmarks!

End users expect nothing short of a flawless experience when visiting your website. A slow-performing, error-prone website can lead to significant losses in revenue and brand value. Do you know how your website performs for real users compared to other similar sites? We are excited to tell you...

What's New in Web Performance? - March 2019

Organizations that do business on the web are at various stages in their digital transformation journey. Some are developing some of the most innovative and immersive digital experiences on the web, others are, for the first time, figuring out how to safely move applications to the cloud with...