Demonstrate Commitment, Differentiate Services, Develop Opportunities

Everything's mobile -- especially today, when running a business is harder than ever -- and responsiveness is everything. Staying ahead of the curve means workers may need to operate in "always available" mode, relying on their phone for business-related tasks, regardless of where they may be. Th...

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...

Two months of Black Fridays?

Black Friday began in the U.S. as a way to funnel Thanksgiving holiday free time into a day of wanton gift shopping. It later spread globally as a retailer promotional blitz to kick off the holiday shopping season. Enter: Black Friday, 2020 style. In early September, many retailers, including Hom...

Distinguishing Among DNS Services Part 1: The Platform

This is Part 1 of a 3-part blog series highlighting some of the distinguishing aspects of Akamai's DNS services, Edge DNS and Global Traffic Management...

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...

What's the point of habitual cookie consent? Analytics?

Last week I read an online post about schoolchildren who are taught in their IT lessons to just accept cookie consent pop-ups when they see them on the screen! That really is the definition of habitual consent. If we think about the intent of consent, it should be informed, unambiguous, and...

Going Beyond Advertising: Revenue Diversification in Publishing

The pandemic has had a profound short-term effect on publishers around the world -- a jump in readership somewhat dampened by disappearing advertising revenue. In many media firms, the digital channel has become most important, accelerating the move to digital while also highlighting the fragilit...

Using LL-HLS with byte-range addressing to achieve interoperability in low latency streaming

Introduction HTTP Adaptive Segmented HAS streaming began to be used at scale from 2008 to 2012, with the advent of Move Networks, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, and MPEG DASH. With the typical 10s segment durations of the day, livestream latencies measuring latency as the time...

Using LL-HLS with Byte-Range Addressing to Achieve Interoperability in Low Latency Streaming

HTTP Adaptive Segmented HAS streaming began to be used at scale from 2008 to 2012, with the advent of Move Networks, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, and MPEG DASH. With the typical 10s segment durations of the day, livestream latencies measuring latency as the time from an actio...

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, --...

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, --...

WordPress Malware Setting Up SEO Shops

While recently looking over my honeypots, I discovered an infection where a malicious actor added a storefront on top of my existing WordPress installation. For background, this particular honeypot is a full instance of WordPress running on a Docker image...

Akamai's Technical Enablement and Education Team, Part of the Global Services and Support Organization, Wins Four Gold, Silver, and Bronze "Excellence in Education" Awards

Akamai's Technical Enablement and Education Team won four coveted Brandon Hall Group awards for excellence in learning. Akamai's win was announced on August 20, 2020. The winners are listed on Brandon Hall Group's website. The award-winning team is responsible for creating product training and...

Toward Inclusive Language in Software

Akamai opposes racism in all its forms and is committed to providing an inclusive, fair, and respectful environment for both our customers and our employees. As part of this commitment, we are joining other technology-industry leaders in removing biased, oppressive, and racially insensitive...

Toward Inclusive Language in Software

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It's universal: We all love to exchange gifts. Singles' Day and Diwali are two more reasons to do so.

There is scientific evidence that humans secrete "feel good" chemicals in their brain, such as serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, while giving. So it's no wonder that many of us look forward to the holidays. Online mobile shopping trends for Singles' Day and Diwali certainly confirm that. Sadly,...

Safeguard Identity Data at the Source

Leverage Identity Cloud's built-in tooling to safeguard your customers' data from unnecessary exposure When your customers create an account on your website or application, they are entrusting their valuable information with you in order to establish a relationship. To maintain that relationship,...

Online Shoppers Undeterred by COVID as Holiday Shopping Season Shifts Earlier

Akamai-Commissioned Survey Hints at Significant Business Consequences If Online Retail Experiences Do Not Meet Consumer Expectations Holiday shoppers are overcoming worries and restrictions and easily adapting to new shopping norms as the COVID-19 pandemic has invaded our lives and made us...

The dangers of firewall misconfigurations

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HTTP/3: Ready to Land

Hi, my name is Mike Bishop; I'm the editor of the newest version of HTTP, HTTP/3. I'm part of Foundry, a team at Akamai that focuses on new and emerging technologies that will impact the future of the web. I've been involved in web standards since the early days of HTTP/2, and most of my work has...

Safeguard Identity Data at the Source

When your customers create an account on your website or application, they are entrusting their valuable information with you in order to establish a relationship. To maintain that relationship, they need to have faith that you will protect their information...

Akamai Wellness in APJ

Creating the world's best and most secure digital experience demands the very best industry talent. But as a responsible employer, we also understand how important it is to play our part in looking after those brilliant minds...

Redundant, Secure, and Open Short Domains: A Vision for Multi-Provider Apex Domain Aliases to Enable DNS Diversity

Human nature is to seek simpler and convenient ways to do things. One example is the sometimes onerous task of typing a URL into a web browser's address bar. Since users prefer short, easy-to-remember URLs, an internet trend is to use short domains for websites e.g., edgedns.zone. With short...

Redundant, Secure, and Open Short Domains: A Vision for Multi-Provider Apex Domain Aliases to Enable DNS Diversity

One Small Step for DNS, One Giant Leap for the Internet Human nature is to seek simpler and convenient ways to do things. One example is the sometimes onerous task of typing a URL into a web browser's address bar. Since users prefer short, easy-to-remember URLs, an internet trend is to use short...

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...

Visualize Visitor Prioritization in Real Time with mPulse

COVID-19 is changing our behavior as we try to avoid person-to-person contact. For example, according to the Google Mobility Report, September 2020 shows an average 23% drop in retail and recreation activity and a 22% drop in workplace traffic in Tokyo compared to a baseline average before COVID-...

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 I write this blog post, the attack is still active and exfiltrating data...

The Origin Is No More

Over the last 15 years, there's been a paradigm shift. Long gone are the days when you built and managed your own data center, were responsible for the physical hardware and the management overhead, and endured the high capital investment of the build and maintenance. As soon as central cloud...

Preparing for Holiday Traffic During COVID-19

We are headed into an unprecedented holiday season as COVID-19 continues to impact the world. For many, this means changing traditions and celebrating without family nearby. For Akamai, it means preparing to support our customers in a holiday commerce season of opportunities and challenges like...

Corporate Office and Kitchen Table: Securing the Future of Work, Part 2

The workforce is remote, the data center is the cloud, the corporate network is the internet, and the security stack is at the edge. In Part 1, I focused on the future of work, the most obvious feature being that the workforce is even more distributed, even more remote. Employees expect to be abl...

Why Our Furniture Will Face the TV for Years to Come

Before the invention of the television, the focal point of any room was the fireplace. In fact, the word "focus" derives from the Latin word for "hearth." However, the invention of the television, coupled with the arrival of central heating, means that, from the mid-20th century onwards, most of ...

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...

Streaming Traffic Peaks on Election Night

Preliminary data shows live news streaming traffic peaked at approximately 18 Tbps on Akamai's Intelligent Edge platform during coverage of the U.S. Presidential Election on November 3rd. That's roughly 5X greater than traffic on a typical day and more than double the 7.5 Tbps peak we observed...

Corporate Office and Kitchen Table: Securing the Future of Work, Part 1

The future of work is multi-modal, the future corporate office is a private coffee shop with great Wi-Fi, and the future of enterprise security is going to have to adapt rapidly. If there is a sliver of positivity that I can find in this devastating pandemic, it's that we are adapting and finding...

Optimize Video Streaming Performance to Reduce Viewer Churn

Why Improve Viewer Experience? Why Now? As online video viewership continues its march to digital mediums and platforms, viewer expectation around the quality of experience is also maturing. Increased video streaming choices and the low cost of switching providers are leading viewers to churn if...

Client-Side Protection is Key to Web Application Security

The Open Web Application Security Project OWASP Foundation defines script attacks as a "type of injection in which malicious scripts are injected into otherwise benign and trusted websites."1 From the perspective of the user, malicious code is coming from trusted websites. Recently popularized by...

Phishing JavaScript Obfuscation Techniques Soars

In our previous blogs, first where we explained JavaScript Obfuscation techniques and introduced a detailed overview on how JavaScript is being used to obfuscate page content to make phishing attacks and other web scams as evasive as possible; followed by one where we took a deep dive to examine...

Onboarding During A Pandemic: Can It Really Work? New Joiner, Lily Nguyen, Shares Her Experience.

I recently joined the Sales Development APAC team, looking after the Vietnam, Thailand and Hong Kong markets. I'd already had a great impression of Akamai's culture from my interview rounds. But how would the onboarding work? I'd been looking forward to meeting new colleagues in an office...

The World Has Moved Online. Has Your Business Adapted?

What would happen if everything we do in the world were to suddenly go online? We got the answer to that question early this year, when the global coronavirus pandemic forced almost everyone and everything to move online: commerce, meetings with colleagues and customers, classroom learning,...

How the Crypto Challenge as Action Helped a Major Airline Reduce False Positives While Protecting the Customer Experience

Challenges of Bot Detection: Keeping Defenses High Without Triggering False Positives Identifying bots is important and complicated work. Keeping up with ever-changing bot technologies and attack strategies requires deep knowledge and continuous threat research. The outbreak of the COVID-19...

The Tale of Double JavaScript Obfuscated Scam

The phishing landscape is constantly evolving. Over the years, it has evolved into a more scalable threat, with an overwhelming amount of campaigns being launched daily. Phishing also changed when criminals started adding more capabilities and features to their toolkits, which make the phishing...

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...

2020 DDoS Extortion Campaign -- A Sequel More Thrilling Than the Original

Costarring Susan McReynolds and Tom Emmons As you might imagine, as the go-to enterprise DDoS mitigation experts, our phones have been "ringing off the hook" as the global extortion DDoS campaign sequel rages on. It's bigger, badder, and features a broader cast of criminal characters than seen...

Akamai Edge Cloud: Scaling IoT, Part 2

IoT has tremendous possibilities to transform our world but will fall short of expectations if the underlying infrastructure cannot support the rapid exchange of massive amounts of information from billions of simultaneous and intermittent connections. Akamai Edge Cloud is designed to enable the...

Akamai Edge Cloud: Scaling IoT, Part 2

IoT has tremendous possibilities to transform our world but will fall short of expectations if the underlying infrastructure cannot support the rapid exchange of massive amounts of information from billions of simultaneous and intermittent connections. Akamai Edge Cloud is designed to enable the...

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...

5G, Security, IoT, Asavie and Akamai

Malicious actors never seem to rest and have always worked remotely. That simple realization hit home during recent global events. Specifically, Akamai saw an increase in malware traffic of over 400% between March 9, 2020 and May 11, 2020 from corporate devices, most of which were being used...

ATA 8.0 Graduation Ceremony

Akamai Technical Academy is a training program designed for people who have an interest and aptitude for technology but may not come from a traditional technical background. Up until now, we have successfully onboarded over 140 incredible people in three Akamai locations: Cambridge MA, US, San Jo...

5G, Security, IoT, Asavie, and Akamai

Malicious actors never rest and have always worked remotely. That simple realization hit home during recent global events. Specifically, Akamai saw an increase in malware traffic of over 400% between March 9 and May 11, 2020 from corporate devices, most of which were being used outside of a...

4 Tips for a Great CIAM RFP

Requests for proposals RFPs are a good way to start the product evaluation process as well as help clarify the project's scope and requirements. RFPs give you the ability to compare products and platforms more objectively and get you the best results for your project. That said, the process of...