Domain Name Consolidation - Observations from the Field

Domain Name Consolidation The market and marketing of Web property domain names is changing. Companies prefer to promote top level domains TLDs, have the option of selecting brand-relevant domain extensions e.g. SaaS.com, and no longer need country-relevant domains to optimize search engine resul...

DNS: Exfiltration vs. Tunneling

The Internet was designed to share data, but sometimes the paths that enable it are blocked. When it comes to bad actors - that's a good thing. Most companies today have a Data Loss Prevention DLP policy to accompany their web proxies and firewalls. Some of them think this is the best way to stop...

Akamai's Leading Role in the DNS Renaissance

In case you haven't been paying attention, an unlikely technology, the Internet's Domain Name System, or DNS, is experiencing a renaissance. For much of its existence, DNS has maintained a simple and singular function - to resolve Internet names to IP addresses. Over the past several years,...

The Slippery Slope Starts with "Get 2 Free Airline Tickets"

Written by Or Katz and Raviv Perets A widespread phishing scam that offers free airline tickets has been spotted in the wild by Akamai's Enterprise Threat Protector ETP security research team. The campaign uses a number of social engineering techniques to trick people into providing their private...

Our ESG Commitment: Investing in a Better World

Environmental, social, and governance ESG issues are quickly emerging as a key concern for investors. To use a musical analogy, the bow is just resting on the first string, with more notes sure to follow. At Akamai, our ESG instrument is well tuned and ready for the symphony to come, as evidenced...

Sustainability at Akamai: An Efficient Platform Powered by Energy Aggregation

If I had a dollar for every time I heard "2020 was an unprecedented year", I could fund a clean energy project myself. And while we're tired of hearing it, it's true. Among the pandemic, U.S. presidential election, social justice movements, the finalization of Brexit, and many other new and...

Protecting Websites from Magecart and Other In-Browser Threats

The Rise of Third-Party Scripts Modern web applications have become increasingly reliant on external code, services and vendors that execute JavaScript code in the browser... often referred to as third-party scripts. As a close-to-home example shown below, Akamai executes dozens of scripts to...

New OTT Service Changing How New Zealanders Watch Sports

Communications service providers are looking for new ways to gain an edge in today's competitive market. In sports-crazed New Zealand, one of the country's largest telecom providers just launched an all-sports video service to attract new subscribers. Spark Sport is a new over-the-top OTT offerin...

Mobile Shopping Growth Accelerates During Diwali

Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights, celebrated every autumn in October or November. According to Redseer Consulting, the sales volume during the festival usually accounts for about 35%-40% of the annual sales of e-commerce in India; for 2018 Redseer predicts $2.5 to $3 billion gross merchandi...

Three tips to prepare for peak traffic

Peak shopping season is just around the corner. Is your website prepared? Some websites slow down, and others simply crash, driving users and revenue away. Your website needs to accommodate a multitude of devices that will be accessing it, along with the potential for malicious attacks such as Bo...

Secure by Design

Carriers providing value-added services need to protect both their network infrastructure and their end-customers from internet threats. New threats are constantly emerging but remodeling your security architecture to address each new threat may leave gaps in your security coverage. Bolting-on...

Part 2: Reading SPAM For Research

A couple weeks ago, I posted a blog that is a follow up of an article I published in Information Security Magazine. In that post I wrote about collecting phishing samples and identifying domain squatters that might be looking to harvest information from their target. This is the final blog entry...

World-Class OTT Streaming from MwareTV with Akamai

Written by: Ina Christova Since the onset of the pandemic, home entertainment has never been more important. Millions of users across the globe have turned to over-the-top OTT streaming and live TV to bring much-needed diversion and exciting content into their lives. MwareTV provides content...

New Admin Portal for Akamai Enterprise Application Access

The definition of a user has evolved to comprise much more than an employee, making secure access to the right application, for the right user, at the right time difficult and complex. Akamai Enterprise Application Access EAA is a unique cloud architecture that closes all inbound firewall ports,...

Is It Worth It to Defend Your Service from Video Piracy?

The answer isn't obvious. From headcount to vendor spend, combating video piracy is expensive. And piracy has been a part of the entertainment industry since the silent movie era. It's not crazy to say, "Maybe it's just a cost of doing show business." So let's start with a different question. How...

FFEM: A Simple Device to Crowdsource Water Quality Data

Akamai has been a strong advocate for water conservation by supporting early-stage innovations. This World Water Monitoring Day September 18, we present the inspiring work of one of our innovators -- Foundation For Environmental Monitoring FFEM, based in Bangalore, India -- that is working on...

Inspecting TLS Web Traffic - Part 3

In the second part of this blog, I covered how HTTPS web content inspection is provided in Akamai's Enterprise Threat Protector ETP service using ETP proxy. In this final blog post I want to provide information about how Akamai generates, distributes and controls access to private keys including...

Global Traffic Management for Cloud, Data Centers, and CDNs

Twenty years ago it would be common to have multiple data centers load balanced with specialized devices. The applications in multiple data centers would use the Domain Name System DNS to look up the application destination. The DNS system would be set up to with multiple data center locations...

Get, Set, Election, Go: Preparing For The 2019 Elections

Meeting the Expectations of Millions as They Go Online on The Election Day The 2019 General Elections could possibly be the most important Election event ever, in India... As India advances towards the general elections, this year, it will be the world's largest democratic exercise, and the bigge...

Remote access in a software defined world

When I first ventured into technology, I wish someone gave me a heads-up about the bevy of acronyms to remember. It feels like every day a new acronym related to technology is formed. It's hard enough remembering names within my family. During Thanksgiving with a full house, I struggle to remembe...

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP): What you need to know

Universal Plug and Play UPnP is a widely used protocol with a decade-long history of flawed implementations across a wide range of consumer devices. In this paper, we will cover how these aws are still present on devices, how these vulnerabilities are actively being abused, and how a...

Can Edge Computing Exist Without the Edge? Part 3: The Economics of Edge Computing

Do the math. For the past decade, digital businesses have been investing in digital transformation initiatives. The promise is to increase top-line growth while maximizing customer lifetime value. As infrastructure improves, IT spending is shifting from the cloud to the edge. But while edge...

Congratulations to 2020 Akamai Partners of the Year

Last year proved to be a year like no other. We faced unforeseen challenges, including adjusting to a new way of working, collaborating, and conducting business. It is an honor for me to announce the Akamai Partners of the Year for 2020 who went above and beyond in this tumultuous year. These...

Streaming Traffic Peaks During Biden Inauguration

Live news streaming traffic during the Biden inauguration ceremony on January 20 peaked at 12 Tbps on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. The peak, which occurred as now-President Biden was taking the oath of office just before 12 PM ET, is roughly 8x higher than what we typically see for mid-d...

Don't Let DDoS Extortionists Deliver a KO Punch

Since mid-August, a variety of threat actors and copycats alike have been targeting organizations across all industries globally, threatening impending DDoS attacks unless Bitcoin is paid out. It's apparent, as the campaign rages on, that some businesses must be paying the extortion demands, --...

What the NIST Zero Trust Architecture Means for Business Continuity

In September 2019, NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology published the first draft of its Zero Trust Architecture ZTA for public feedback. A second draft was issued in February 2020 that incorporated industry feedback from the first cycle and solicited more comments. The document is...

March 2020 - The Importance of Video in the Digital Customer Experience

Welcome to Day 4 of Akamai's March 2020 Release. Before we dive into today's announcements, just a reminder of the week's schedule: Monday was Day 1 for security, with enhancements to Bot Manager, Fast DNS, Kona Site Defender, Managed Security Service, Prolexic Routed, and Web Application...

Visit Akamai at AWS re:Invent 2019

From December 2-6, the Las Vegas Strip will be jam-packed with tens of thousands of developers, engineers, admins, architects, and other technologists for AWS re:Invent, the annual learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services for the global cloud computing community. Akamai is excited to be ...

CPDoS Poisoning Attack

On October 22, 2019, a new method of web cache poisoning, called CPDoS or Cache Poisoned Denial of Service, was announced by researchers, Hoai Viet Nguyen and Luigi Lo Iacono. Targeting content delivery networks and other caching systems, the attack works by using a malicious header in the HTTP...

What makes a good "DNS Blacklist"? - Part 1

Reflections on Modern Actionable Threat Intelligence used to turn a DNS Resolver into a Critical Security Tool Akamai has just launched the Enterprise Threat Protection ETP platform. ETP is built on Akamai's global AnswerX Cloud that now reaches 28 countries and is expanding to new countries ever...

Cutting the Red Tape: Lessons Learned from CyberThreats 2021

If I had a dollar for every time I heard the phrase "digital transformation," I would have a lot of dollars. I'm sure you would too. We'd have even more if we counted the term "Zero Trust." Maybe we should start counting them, now that I think about it! Speakers and authors often use these buzz...

Why Developers Are Writing Apps on Our Edge Platform

A lot of companies talk about edge computing today, but at Akamai, we've been doing it for more than 20 years. We were the first company to offer edge computing services, beginning in 1999 with advanced metadata, an XML-based language used to enable a variety of capabilities on our edge platform ...

What's New in Web Security

With Akamai's web security portfolio, the top focus this October is on the web application firewall WAF, with exciting new capabilities: API Discovery and Adaptive Security Profiles. Along with the rest of the industry, Akamai has observed a long-term shift in the applications that we're...

Managing Traffic From the Outset - How GTM Can Make Your Deployments Easier

What is GTM Global Traffic Management, or GTM, is a DNS-based load balancing service that offers application owners a level of flexibility and insight that is unmatched by traditional on-prem solutions. Highly scalable and fault-resilient, GTM offers customers a layer of abstraction between...

Akamai e Exceda: maximizando juntas o valor do cliente e do parceiro na América Latina

A Akamai anunciou hoje um acordo de compra da Exceda, nossa maior parceira de canal na América Latina. Quero compartilhar o que essa aquisição significa para nossos clientes e parceiros e por que estou tão empolgado com o potencial disso para todos nós. A partir de sua parceria inicial em 2002, a...

Professional Services Simplified - Check out what's new!

In today's fast-moving digital world, we know businesses need to rapidly adapt to meet user expectations and stay competitive. At Akamai, we see a world of unimagined potential, enabled through the unique power of the Akamai Edge. It's this power, backed by the support of our 2000 global experts,...

You bet your mobile app consumers are willing to pay with their smartphone

For almost 10 years, there has been a debate over mobile app versus mobile web. Which strategy is right for your business and will consumers really ever buy something with a mobile device? Some of these questions have been clearly answered with time, but some aspects of the debate continue. The...

Six years since World IPv6 Launch: entering the majority phases

As reported in an ISOC report last year, IPv6 adoption is now solidly in the "early majority phase" of the technology adoption life cycle by many metrics well past "innovators" and "early adopters", with progress beyond that in some areas. Akamai continues to see solid growth in IPv6, including...

Coin Mining Malware and What Akamai Can do About It

It has been a busy few months for crypto-mining! The advent of cryptocurrency1 has resulted in a rollercoaster ride of interest in the last 18 months, with millions of people making and losing millions in physical currency. Through all of this, cryptocurrency has been a heavy target for...

WireX update: UDP attack capabilities

Akamai would like to acknowledge the research by F5 containing additional information on the capabilities of this malware, released September 2nd. Finding new features The WireX botnet was discovered due to its role in a series of prolonged attacks against several organizations. It was brought to...

Observed Changes to the Threat Landscape in 2020

Reflecting on the cybersecurity threat landscape in 2020, we can't overlook the massive changes that landed on us. Global security attacks increased at a significant pace between 2019 and 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic only deepened these troubling conditions. As corporations tried to adapt to...

API Discovery and Profiling -- Visibility to Protection

APIs have become a dominant mechanism in the modern web, allowing organizations to create powerful web and mobile experiences, while exposing back-end data and logic to create new and innovative offerings. Protecting internet-facing APIs -- an emerging practice over the past few years -- is the...

Preparing the Edge for a Big Year in Live Streaming

Next year is shaping up to be a big one for live streaming. Typically characteristic of even years, when many major international sporting events take place, 2021 looks like it could defy the trend. Akamai is predicting an unprecedented surge in live streaming that will start in late 2020 and...

Akamai Mitigates Sophisticated 1.44 Tbps and 385 Mpps DDoS Attack

It always surprises me how easily a community can adapt to a new situation or reality. What was once considered an outlier or even an unimaginable situation can quickly become our new normal. For those of us focused on protecting enterprises from threats, that also couldn't be more accurate...

Akamai and Microsoft: Delivering a Better Zero Trust Access Model for the Hybrid Enterprise Together

The best partnerships evolve over time and are forged with a common goal. Microsoft and Akamai have partnered for years with the common goal of delivering integrated solutions that address real customer problems. A great example is optimizing global end-user performance for cloud workloads with...

Enhancing API Gateway With Request Throttling to Manage Overconsumption

API traffic is exploding online and across the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. APIs are the connective tissue among organizations driving innovative and integrated digital experiences. As these experiences are mission critical for organizations to monetize partnerships, create connections for...

Integrating Akamai mPulse with Consent Management Providers

Akamai mPulse is a real user monitoring solution, providing detailed information about the user experiences delivered by your web applications. mPulse can be configured within your Akamai property to automatically start collecting data from your customer visits. This initial setup will gather the...

Holiday Readiness, Part Three: What you Should be Thinking About Two Months Out?Performance Optimizations

October is here, and that means we are less than two months away from the busiest weekend of the year. Parts one and two of the Holiday Readiness blog series covered topics ranging from security checklists to disaster recovery strategies and flash crowd management. If you haven?t had a chance to...

SolarWinds Hack and the Case of DNS Security

It's not news that some of the top government agencies and companies in the world were victims of the SolarWinds attack. At this point, I can say it's the reason I didn't have a smoother transition back into work-life following a long vacation. As I understand it, the breaches happened after...

Shifting Strategies

Formula One is always a sport I wanted to enjoy more than I actually did. I found the strategy always more compelling than the actual racing, which was usually just a procession. Of course, the crashes were always spectacular, not least because it would cause all the team strategies to be...