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...

Akamai Recommendations for Log4j Mitigation

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Akamai Helps Q-dance Bring Its Tribe to Defqon.1 at Home -- a Global Virtual Festival Experience

By: Ina Christova Every year, Q-dance part of the ID&T group, a Dutch electronic music experience company, delights its die-hard fans or their "tribe" at the world's largest hardstyle festival, Defqon.1. Helicopters, simulated earthquakes, special moments like Power Hour, and amazing shows make u...

Emerging Edge Computing Use Cases

The first rule of edge compute thought leadership is: don't overuse the term edge. Over the course of my blog series on the topic, I have defined the edge, explained edge computing, and discussed the economics of edge computing. There have also been a few articles in which I've discussed how...

EdgeWorkers Use Story: Creating high-performing, individualized campaign responses in online retail

As campaigns and digital experiences become more individualized, they can create a challenge for delivering content to consumers at the highest velocity. Having each paid search, social media, and email marketing campaign add unique query string parameters to requests is critical for tracking the...

Enterprise Application Access Client (EAA) Vulnerability (CVE-2019-18847)

On October 15, 2019, Tesla discovered, and responsibly disclosed, a vulnerability within Akamai's Enterprise Application Access EAA client that allows privilege escalation and remote code execution RCE when an attacker is within privileged locations on a network. This vulnerability has been...

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 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...

Week 6 of Girls Who Code: Artificial Intelligence and Human Expertise at Watson Health

Week 6 of the Girls Who Code summer-immersion program at Akamai featured a field trip to IBM's Watson Health, where the girls learned about the concept of "cognitive computing," and how this technology is being used by IBM to help doctors help their patients. The girls met some of the women at IB...

Superior and safe user experiences with the Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform

Your customers are unique and they all expect fast, secure, personalized digital experiences. They are spread across the world, in regions of varying network connectivity, utilize a plethora of devices and screen sizes - making it challenging to deliver your experiences. By delivering 95 Exabytes...

Software-Defined Networking Concept Adoption at Akamai

Akamai engineering has adopted new technology concepts to enhance and expand routing capabilities at the edge. Previously, Akamai's traffic-steering capabilities were mainly focused on DNS-based routing. In this article, we would like to give you an in-depth look at how Akamai has embraced new...

How did your turkey trot to your home this year?

Despite the fact that I only had two guests for Thanksgiving yesterday, I still cooked enough food for 15 people, and all of the ingredients were ordered online and delivered to my front door by a nice delivery person who we have come to know fairly well over the past six months. 2020 has changed...

Computing at the Edge

Welcome to the Akamai October 2020 Update - a week of product updates, new features, and innovations. We'll be highlighting a different area of our portfolio each day this week. In today's post, we look at our enhanced edge computing capabilities and how they help developers more effectively and...

Can the Internet keep up with the surge in demand?

As a company that's been in the business of enabling the Internet for 22 years, Akamai is hearing from a lot of people lately who all want to know one thing: Can the Internet keep up with the sudden surge in demand? Will it scale? What happens to performance? And what about security when almost a...

Unexpected Inflection Point

For decades, those of us who work on the infrastructure of the web have heard and talked a lot about "inflection points" -- points at which we have seen notable increases in Internet usage driven by commerce, entertainment, financial services, travel, etc. And now, without warning, the world...

Future Proofing Your Content Security Perimeter with Enhanced Token Authentication

Background: Media Content Security Security in the media & entertainment industry means securing the entire content consumption path. For any OTT or streaming company that wants to serve or distribute its content to end users, has to protect and safeguard their content against an ever-evolving...

Architecting DNS for DDoS Durability and Resilience

My business depends on my domain name being 100% available. How do I ensure my domain name is durable to attack and resilient during Internet stress? After many years of hard work from many Internet engineers and system administrators, Akamai Technologies has been working towards DNS infrastructu...

How Harmonic Proved High-Performance AI Inference on Akamai GPUs

Find out how Harmonic achieved high-performance AI inference on Akamai Cloud with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, optimizing for speed and efficiency...

Markdown Menace: Discovering an LFI Vulnerability on a Blogging Platform

Protecting sensitive information is a recurring and widely known concern in the security community. As researchers, we know all too well how information can be used maliciously I mean, come on … it’s our job. Considering the size of the threat vector that is LFI, it’s something that developers an...

The Countdown Has Started -- The Move Toward Zero Trust and MFA

In early May 2021, the President of the United States issued an executive order on cybersecurity, and though it will take some time for executive branch agencies to develop formal rules, the order itself includes a lot of what I consider to be best practice in cybersecurity, including the use of...

2021: Volumetric DDoS Attacks Rising Fast

In our 2020 DDoS retrospective, we highlighted the twists and turns of a very, very active threat landscape. As a quick refresher, we mitigated some of the largest attacks ever seen 1.44 Tbps and 809 Mpps; saw more attacks on customers across more diverse industries than ever before; and observed...

Finding the Cracks in the Wall - How Modern Scams Bypass MFA

In my previous blog, I discussed the important role multi-factor authentication MFA plays in further securing access to enterprise and consumer services. We also established the fact that although MFA increases authentication security and decreases the risk of account takeover, MFA can, and is,...

Keeping Emissions in Check During Unprecedented Internet Use

As I reflect on 2020 and the way in which the pandemic affected the business world, what stands out to me is the incredible increase in streaming content consumed on the internet. We've seen launches of some of the highest-profile streaming services to date between late 2019 and 2020. People are...

Accelerator Program for Early-Stage Innovations in Water: An Akamai India CSR Flagship Initiative

Continuing in our commitment to sustainability, Akamai is excited to announce the launch of our accelerator program supporting innovators and building solutions to address India's water challenges. A concerted effort by the Akamai India leadership team, the accelerator program is being launched a...

Akamai's 3 Takeaways from the Gartner CIAM Solution Comparison

We have eagerly awaited Gartner's analysis of the growing CIAM industry. According to Gartner, in its August 2019 Solution Comparison for Customer Identity and Access Management Capabilities of 9 Vendors, "CIAM offerings are expanding and are now key business enablers for unifying customer...

Three Keys to Infusing Security into your Corporate Culture

Creating a security-oriented culture is a challenge for many businesses. There's a natural tension between development teams, that are under constant pressure to get new applications and features to market as quickly as possible, and security teams that need to protect critical systems and...

Launching the Melbourne Scrubbing Centre

We are excited to announce the launch of Akamai's newest scrubbing centre in Australia. While Akamai has been protecting ANZ customers from large and complex DDoS attacks for years, the new Melbourne scrubbing centre will allow us to provide higher resilience and reduce latency for in-region...

Do DDoS attacks originate from Cloud Service Providers?

In a word, yes. Cloud service providers CSPs continue to power a growing portion of the greater Internet. According to Cisco, by 2021, 73 percent of cloud workloads are going to be CSP based, which reflects a compound annual growth rate of 27.5 percent from 2016 to 2021. Unfortunately, CSPs are...

State of the Internet Security - Credential Stuffing

Credential stuffing, and the botnets behind this activity, is the primary focus of the State of the Internet Security Report, Issue 4, 2018. Credential stuffing, the use of botnets to try to login to a site with stolen or randomly created login information, isn't a new phenomenon, but it is one...

Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Security Technology and GDPR

Many of our customers conducting business in Europe are concerned about how the new General Data Protection Regulation "GDPR" impacts the ability to protect their organization's data, network and IT system resources. In particular, many worry that the requirements of GDPR will restrict their...

Learn How Trillions of DNS Requests Help Improve Security

Akamai's global platform is comprised of 240,000 servers in 3,750 locations within 134 countries. Additionally, our platform interacts with 1.3 billion client devices every day and we ingest 2.5 exabytes of data a year. So why are these stats important? The answer is that this visibility provides...

Data Breaches and Credential Stuffing: Don't Get TKOd

It has been a very rough month for the information security community. It feels like we've been on the losing end of a championship fight against Floyd Mayweather. The body shots started with Equifax https://investor.equifax.com/news-and-events/news/2017/09-07-2017-213000628 and continued with...

Girls Who Code Weeks 3 and 4: Robots, the Internet and College

The summer is flying by, and we have reached the mid-point of our Girls Who Code Summer Immersion program. Our students are smart, engaged, learning a ton, and seem to be having a lot of fun! Last week was about robotics. The girls wired and programmed Arduino robots to perform a variety of tasks...

The Myth of the self tuning / machine learning Web Application Firewall

There's an old adage that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. If you're like me, you can apply this to your own experiences. For example, about 5 years ago a small chain of gyms that exclusively used vibrating exercise machines popped up near my home. Their gym goers would sta...

Secure (and Simple) SharePoint Remote Access

SharePoint, Microsoft's 16-year-old flagship file storage and collaboration product, is used by over 200 million worldwide users. Likened to a Swiss Army knife, SharePoint performs so many functions that it has become an integral part of most enterprise IT fabrics. Of course, it is not perfect - ...

Crypto Threats Surge by 500%, and It's All About the Money

Previously reserved for early adopters and tech-savvy consumers, cryptocurrencies have gone mainstream -- with tech entrepreneurs and prominent financial institutions leading the charge. In the past year, rapidly increasing cryptocurrency rates, the introduction of new currencies, and the officia...

Akamai Titans 2020: Celebrating Outstanding Achievements

To Akamai's Co-Founder Danny Lewin, calling someone a "Titan" was the highest praise he would give. Danny himself was a remarkably talented and hard-working leader whose heart, passion, and spirit still inspire us. Today, Danny's accolade is used to honor those exceptional people who are known fo...

Akamai's New ESG Office: A Catalyst for Environmental and Social Progress

We're proud of the progress Akamai has made in environmental, social, and governance ESG performance. From reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% and powering our platform with 50% renewable energy, to the millions invested in STEM education grants for underserved students, giving back to o...

The Importance of Education in Furthering the Sustainability Agenda

Author: Mark Porter, Director, Supply Chain & International Collaboration, Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance REBA Mark Porter moved to REBA from Rocky Mountain Institute's Business Renewables Center BRC initiative in March 2019. Mark continues to support the BRC initiative across all areas and gro...

Cyberattacks Evolve as the Hospitality and Travel Industry Adapts

While the world fights against the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercriminals are out in full force with a multitude of scams designed to take advantage of the confusion and panic. COVID-19 has -- by necessity -- made us all more comfortable working, playing, and buying online. This global shift to digita...

How to Be Resilient to Data Theft

Page Integrity Manager is now PCI compliant -- a strong starting point to harden your web applications. Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard PCI DSS is fundamental for any business that accepts payment cards or processes payment card data. Many financial services...

March 2020 -- What's New in Security, Part 1

Welcome to Akamai's March 2020 Release! This release offers a week of product updates, with each day highlighting continued innovations across a different area of Akamai's product portfolio: Monday and Tuesday feature two days of security updates. There's a lot going on in Akamai's security...

Black Friday Stays Mobile

If you're anything like me, you have no interest in physically entering a store the day after Thanksgiving. I do, however, love to shop online in the comfort of my home. While many people start their holiday shopping on Black Friday, I go to my favorite online retailers a day or two early, add wh...

Akamai Outlook: Optimizing Edge Delivery Performance and Monitoring

Written by: Ritesh Kalyanshetty and Sandeep Singh Pervasiveness of CDNs within the expanding Media and Entertainment Industry Media and entertainment companies, including content owners and over-the-top OTT service providers are living in an era symbolized by a dramatic increase in content...

Do High Vanity Bitrates Choke Your Live OTT Service Out of the Gate?

Studies show that video consumption demand is growing faster than capacity. While capacity overhead does exist, current trends suggest that we'll see more bottlenecking on last-hop connectivity, especially with regionally targeted content. By pushing "vanity bitrates" -- those topmost speeds that...

People Spent More Time with Their Mom this Mother's Day in the U.K.

The first major peak traffic event for online shopping in the United Kingdom is Mother's Day, held this year on Sunday, March 31. As we did during peak holiday traffic events last year, we tabulated and analyzed aggregate statistics from global online retail traffic that touched nearly 100 retail...

Akamai mentors next generations of girls in tech

This summer Akamai hosted Girls Who Code for its fourth year in a row. Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organization that aims to support and increase the number of women in computer science. Akamai sponsored the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion program this past summer by providing the facilities an...

Will Subscribers Pay for Security?

Carriers see security as a vital component of their five-year strategies and expect to increase spending on security in 2018 according to the Telecoms.com Annual Industry Survey 2017. Is security a good business opportunity for Carriers? Turns out investment in security has a good payback based o...

Cybersecurity Executive Order 13800: More than a Risk Assessment?

Written by Sr. Solutions Engineer, Micah Maryn. Most folks around the Washington DC beltway have heard the cybersecurity Executive Order EO 13800 - Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure referred to as a simple risk assessment. But the reality is that it i...

To Keep Players Happy, First Seek Understanding

Me: To keep your players happy - you need to understand why they're not. You: Uh, yeah obviously. Thanks. So what? Actually, I have a lot to say on the topic of keeping players happy. A few months back I wrote a quick post about Friction. Friction, as I defined it, is anything that prompts your...