DNS Encryption at DNS OARC 32

The DNS DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center DNS OARC is an organization that, in their own words, works to "improve the security, stability, and understanding of the Internet's DNS infrastructure." They hold regular workshops where deployment experts, software developers, researchers, a...

Supporting COVID-19 Vaccine Rollouts with Vaccine Edge

Global efforts to produce and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine continue to race ahead. But in many cases, that race is an uphill climb. Beyond the challenges in making enough of the vaccine, educating the public, and the logistics of distributing the doses, there is a new challenge. Bots...

Designing the Smart Experience at Akamai HQ

We are now 90 days out from a major milestone for Akamai: the opening of our new headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The state-of-the-art tower in the tech hub of Kendall Square is particularly exciting for me in my dual roles as CIO and SVP of Global Services & Support, because it marks th...

Women in Security: Security Technical Project Manager

We continue to see large-scale online security attacks affecting corporations and public institutions. These attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated, making it harder to protect yourself. The constant evolution of attacks requires innovative solutions that only Akamai can provide...

Akamai Attends The Massachusetts Clean Energy Preview with Governor Baker

On January 22 - the day after the 2020 Massachusetts State of the Commonwealth speech - Akamai's Sustainability team participated in a clean energy legislative preview with Governor Baker and Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Theoharides of Massachusetts, Ceres, and other key business...

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...

Embracing Data Privacy Day

January 28 is Data Privacy Day, commemorating the Council of Europe Treaty known as Convention 108, the first legally binding international treaty on data protection signed on January 28, 1981. This "holiday" was originally celebrated in Europe where it is known as Data Protection day. But in 200...

Online Holiday Shopping followed the Hot Topics of 2019: Mobile & Security

Here's what I learned this past holiday season: I'm not alone shopping on my mobile device on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. And while Hollywood actors may take the holidays off, threat actors certainly do not. Let's have a look at some of the numbers. Akamai has a lot of data, but let's look at...

Zero Trust Access: Santa Claus Wasn't the Only One Working Christmas Eve

The days from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day are filled with celebrations. Many companies shut down and encourage their employees to take vacations. However, a sample of data comparing an average work week around the holiday, shows the idea of "downtime" isn't exactly accurate. In fact, many use...

Abusing the Service Workers API

The Service Worker web API is a powerful new API for web browsers. During our research, we have found several ways attackers can leverage this API to enhance their low-to-medium risk findings into a powerful and meaningful attack. By...

Guardicore Centra Release v 31

Guardicore Centra v 31 includes such features as user-based rules and a threat intelligence firewall. Read more about the updates and improvements...

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...

Maintain Your Streaming Posture During Failures With Origin Failover

Maintaining a high-quality playback experience for users is extremely critical whether it is for on-demand content or for large-scale live events. Origin failures occur when a server is overwhelmed with requests, due to congested networks or other unexpected events. These failures can keep origin...

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) – Risks and Solutions

Leverage the benefits of VDI without opening yourself to security risk. Guardicore provides user access management and microsegmentation for Citrix...

HTTP Cache Poisoning Advisory

Summary On January 14, 2020, CERT CC published an advisory warning of the potential use of Content Delivery Networks CDNs to cache malicious traffic. Akamai acknowledges this issue and has been aware of similar research in the past. This advisory...

Streaming and Security: In Conversation With Smita Aeron

People from around the globe are looking for instant and uninterrupted access to streaming services, on any device and in any location. But delivering high-quality streams that can easily scale to meet audience demand is no easy task. To better...

Geolocation and DNS Traffic Management

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...

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...

Inspecting TLS Web Traffic - Part 2

In the first blog post I covered why HTTPS web traffic has grown to unprecedented levels, provided a TLS primer and looked at the basic concept of intercepting and inspecting HTTPS web traffic with Man-In-The-Middle techniques MITM. In the second part, I will dive a bit deeper into how the TLS MI...

Akamai Improves Global Delivery Performance

As part of Akamai's ongoing investments in improving delivery performance, last month we completed the worldwide deployment of the Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT BBR TCP congestion control algorithm across our Edge Platform. The BBR algorithm is designed to help improve the reliability and resilien...

Inspecting TLS Web Traffic - Part 1

In this series of blogs I'm going to talk about how the continued move towards all web traffic being encrypted has impacted enterprise security. In this blog I'm going to focus on the basics - what is encrypted web traffic and how can you proactively control this. TLS encryption is the de-facto...

Guardicore Centra Integration now available on CyberArk Marketplace

Privileged Access Management is part of a zero-trust model. Guardicore strengthens its offering by integrating with CyberArk...

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...

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

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...

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...

Why DNS Visibility Matters in Education

My colleague in Spain recently wrote an informative article about DNS Protection and why it's a must-have security solution for any company. Building out on this topic, I would like to look specifically at the Education market and what the consequences can be if DNS Visibility is not taken...

Akamai Prolexic - Mitigating Large Scale DDoS Attacks in 0 seconds

Large scale multi-vector DDOS attack thwarted in 0 Seconds A recent large attack levied against one of our global online gaming customers highlights the value of Akamai Prolexic's 0 Second SLA. As attacks ramp up more quickly than ever before, Akamai's SOCC demonstrates every day how having a...

Phishing Trends Position ISPs to Protect Subscribers

Akamai just released the 2019 State of the Internet SOTI security report: Phishing - Baiting the Hook featuring findings from the enterprise and carrier research teams. They've been collaborating for two years to develop better methods for evaluating massive volumes of anonymized, live-streamed D...

Akamai Foundation and Social Responsibility

Recently, at Akamai, we launched the Akamai Foundation, to continue to reach a broader, more diverse range of young people with quality Science, Technology, Engineering and Math STEM education. We believe that this work is a vital part of securing...

Enterprise Threat Protector as a Security Enabler in 2020

In the early 2000s, security was mostly focused on perimeter separation between the trusted corporate internal network and the untrusted everything else. Separation was very clear, as most corporate applications were inside the perimeter and users were office based, with a very low amount of remo...

In Conversation: Successful Women

Success is a tricky word to define. It means something different to everyone and can only be measured by an individual themselves. Often, success is seen as being about what an individual achieves, rather than about who they grow to...

Fake Cozy Bear Group Making DDoS Extortion Demands

A group calling themselves "Cozy Bear" has been emailing various companies with an extortion letter, demanding payment and threatening targeted DDoS attacks if their demands are not met...

Alibaba's Singles' Day Set Sales Records: Reinforces Mobile Optimization Lessons for All Retailers

On its 20th anniversary, Singles' Day 11 November, a popular Chinese shopping day meant to celebrate the status of those who are single, set a new one-day record of $38 billion in sales, a 26% increase over 2018 $30.7 billion, according to multiple media reports. However, according to Akamai data...

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 ...

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...

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...

October Release: Q&A with Ari Weil

Shortly after Akamai announced the October 2019 Release with new features and capabilities across its security, performance and media product lines, Akamai's VP of Product Marketing, Ari Weil, took over Akamai's Twitter account for a live October Release Q&A. For those that missed the live event,...

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...

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...

Phishing Detection via Analytic Networks

As mentioned in previous Akamai blogs, phishing is an ecosystem of mostly framework developers and buyers who purchase kits to harvest credentials and other sensitive information. Like many framework developers, those focusing on phishing kits want to create an efficient...

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...

My First Job—Being Inspired and Having an Impact

Written by Bridget Meuse, Product Marketing Specialist - Corporate Sustainability I've recently hit my four-month mark here at Akamai and it's been a whirlwind, to say the least. Despite having had two previous summer internships at Akamai, stepping into my...

Krakow's Commitment to a Sustainable Office and Community

Written by Courtney Hadden, Corporate Sustainability, and Karolina Galeziowska, Krakow Sustainability Team Lead As an essential part of the Internet for over 20 years, Akamai believes it is our responsibility to help create digital experiences that are fast, intelligent and secure, while caring f...

Customer Experience and IT

Earlier this month, Akamai participated in CX Day, a global event dedicated to the customer experience. This was our first time celebrating, and I was lucky enough to join my fellow leaders for the event. I got my start at Akamai in Professional Services, so CX has always been central to my work,...

Akamai Identified as a Leader Among Zero Trust Providers by Independent Research Firm

We are pleased to share that Akamai has been identified as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q4 2019. In the report, Forrester evaluated how each vendor's portfolio maps and delivers on specific components of the Zero Trust eXtended ZTX framework...

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...

A View into Top Level Domain (TLD) Abuse

Data science and security research teams in the carrier organization at Akamai process massive volumes of DNS queries every day to detect and track malicious activity. The data is live-streamed from DNS resolvers deployed in diverse service provider networks in every region of the world. Provider...

Volunteering with Girls Who Code

Volunteering with Girls Who Code has been one of the most enriching and edifying experiences of my time here at Akamai. I was chosen to serve as a mentor to one of the high school students, gave the NOCC tour...

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...

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...