Phishing in the Wild: A New Threat Research Paper

Phishing is an extremely common attack vector that has been used for many years, and the potential impact and risks involved are well known to most Internet users. Despite this, phishing is still a highly relevant attack method being used in the wild, affecting many people. The question is, how c...

How to Make Your Demo Environment Easy, Accessible...AND Secure

A common misconception I've heard in the field is that a tradeoff exists between easy access for applications and network security. For example, companies want to allow their sales team, partners, and prospects access into demo environments. With traditional access solutions, there is a question ...

How-To: Add Timing-Allow-Origin Header to Improve Your Website Performance Measurements

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Who is doing what on your network?

Over the past few months, while talking to customers, the topic of Zero Trust Architecture keeps coming up. Seemingly everyone is thinking of implementing the model - which we fully encourage! One of the core components of the principle is the ability to inspect and log all network and system...

Addressing the Availability of the ACAEngine

In my experience as a Solutions Engineer, I've seen many companies strive for 100% uptime of enterprise applications. However, this is a goal that cannot happen by itself. Careful thought must be put into the underlying architecture that delivers these critical enterprise applications. Recently,...

Take a Tour of New Routed Dashboard

As a product manager, there are few things more rewarding than finally putting your product into the hands of your customer for the first time. We've been working on the new Routed Dashboard for some time, and I've personally spoken to many of you in terms of what would make our new interface mor...

Actionable Threat Intelligence, Tailored to You

We are very excited to be launching the next generation of our Client Reputation product. This update takes Client Reputation a huge step further in providing our customers with truly actionable intelligence tailored for them. It computes an even better assessment of the real risk that every...

How You Get There Matters: "Middle-Mile" RUM to Drive CDN Strategy

Traditional RUM products make use of APIs Navigation-Timing, Resource-Timing, etc. built into browsers to help measure the performance characteristics of the loading of a web page. That is, they do their best to quantify the work required by the browser when rendering a web page. APM products use...

Akamai 2018 Spring Release, In A Nutshell

Progressing Towards Our Future in The Cloud, Together As organizations continue to fuel and execute on their digital transformation ambitions, they're increasingly finding significant business agility and cost savings by adopting cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid architectures. Availability, security...

TLS 1.3 support is coming this spring

While March brings NCAA Madness, this year it also brought TLS 1.3, which will be coming to all Akamai customers soon! Let's give some background. TLS 1.3 is latest revision of the TLS protocol. It is also known by its older name, SSL. It is the protocol used for all secure HTTP connections on th...

Perception Matters: Making RUM More Real

Traditional nav timing metrics have given us a lot in the way of understanding how our pages and apps are performing, but as users' expectations rise and page complexity grows, you need to really understand how users are perceiving the performance of your website beyond traditional page load...

Introducing Web Security Analytics

Every security team knows that the success of any security product relies heavily on the ability to maintain an optimal security configuration. Any misconfiguration can result in malicious or undesired traffic reaching the application, or worse - legitimate traffic being blocked. In addition, it...

The Recipe for Web Performance Starts with the Right Ingredients: Page Construction Metrics

You can't manage what you can't measure. As devices grow in capacity and innovations allow us to do more with web apps, the complexity of our pages has grown, too. It becomes a balancing act to increase functionality while maintaining a performant and responsive site. Just like a great recipe, to...

Measure What Matters: Your Competitive Advantage May Lie in Your Understanding (or Lack of Understanding) of What Users Are Really Experiencing

Attracting and retaining customers lies in your ability to offer an exceptional digital experience. Now that digital channels are increasingly preferred over channels of the past, the climate is increasingly competitive -- and businesses are fighting to maintain loyalty and keep users engaged...

What's New with Prolexic

There have been two constants in DDoS over the last 10+ years: an ever-changing threat landscape and continuous growth in attack sizes. Akamai's Prolexic platform has stood the test of time, but we are continuing to invest in ways to make our customers' experience more valuable and relevant. I'm...

Introducing Web Security Analytics

Every security team knows that the success of any security product relies heavily on the ability to maintain an optimal security configuration. Any misconfiguration can result in malicious or undesired traffic reaching the application, or worse - legitimate traffic being blocked. In addition, it...

Akamai and Duo have announced a technology partnership for Zero Trust

Akamai continues to build a zero trust ecosystem by integrating it's Enterprise Application Access EAA with Duo's Multi-Factor Authentication MFA solution. Duo now natively integrates into EAA and augments access with push-based MFA, phone call delivery of MFA tokens, and additional device level...

Part 2: The Dark Side of APIs

Ryan Barnett, Principal Security Researcher, Akamai Elad Shuster, Senior Security Researcher, Akamai During its research into Credential Abuse attack campaigns, Akamai's threat research team conducted an analysis of web logins to gain insights into how widespread the adoption of API-based logins ...

Effectively Detecting Low Throughput and Malicious DNS Exfiltration

In a previous blog post, we described how the DNS protocol, mainly designed for hostname to IP addresses resolution, can be abused for arbitrary data exchange. Based on throughput i.e., bytes per hour, we distinguish between two classes of data exchange over the DNS protocol. The first of the two...

The Dark Side of APIs: Part 1, 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 communication methods. APIs serve as software building blocks and allow for software reuse - essentially allowing fast...

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...

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...

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...

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...

How smart is my smart TV?

Some weeks ago, my friend asked me the headlining question while we were having a random argument about electronics. I found it to be an interesting one, particularly because it underlines the current mindset towards security of electronic devices communicable over computer networks. We are...

What You Need To Know: "SNIPR" Credential Stuffing Tool

Overview Credential abuse CA is a trend that is here to stay. It affects almost every one of us. There are attackers trying to break into every online account and the vast majority of these attacks are happening silently in the background. In the past, credential abuse tools were written and...

Illuminating the Path to Digital Maturity

Research By Akamai and Forrester Sheds New Light on Digital Experience Challenges and Opportunities Nearly every business today is striving to create and deliver digital experiences that stand apart. But it's no small task turning those visions into reality. Moreover, there's little room for erro...

Illuminating the Path to Digital Maturity

Research By Akamai and Forrester Sheds New Light on Digital Experience Challenges and Opportunities Nearly every business today is striving to create and deliver digital experiences that stand apart. But it's no small task turning those visions into reality. Moreover,...

Zero Trust and the Slowly Boiled Frog

Disclaimer: No actual frogs were harmed in the writing of the blog post. We wouldn't do that. We like frogs. What is Zero Trust Networking? The Zero Trust security model was proposed by John Kindervag of Forrester Research back in 2010. The concept is that the traditional trust model of "trust, b...

Recovering Plaintext Passwords from Azure Virtual Machines

Security design flaw in the VM Access plugin that may enable a cross platform attack impacting every machine type provided by Azure. Read More...

Experiments with Browser Preconnects

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Smart DNS Resolution for a Better Safer Internet

By Arlen Frew Top-level Domain TLD operators are focused on making the Internet a better and safer place, enabling name registrations, and maintaining the DNS namespace in support of their stakeholders. The entire Internet ecosystem, including TLDs, is always looking for ways to improve security...

Make way for HTTPS - Starting July 2018, Google Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as "not secure"

Days of clear-text HTTP, the original but insecure foundation for data communication over the web, are numbered. Over the past few years, Google and others such as the Internet Architecture Board, Mozilla, and Apple have nudged developers to encrypt and authenticate their websites using HTTPS whi...

memcached, now with extortion!

Over the past week, memcached reflection attacks have taken the DDoS scene by storm. With several attacks hitting organizations across many industries, including a record breaking 1.3Tbps attack against an Akamai customer. Akamai has observed a new trend in extortion attempts using memcached...

Memcached-fueled 1.3 Tbps attacks

At 17:28 GMT, February 28th, Akamai experienced a 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack against one of our customers, a software development company, driven by memcached reflection. This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September, 2016 attacks that announced th...

Survey Says: So Long Grey Skies - Telecoms 2018 Outlook

Nominum, a part of Akamai, recently partnered with Telecoms.com to survey over 1,500 telecom professionals to get a sense of their concerns, initiatives and expectations for 2018. The findings are captured in the report Telecoms.com Annual Industry Survey 2017. Top concerns, outlined A top concer...

How do I know if I'm Secure?

Remember those commercials for excessive cell phone roaming coverage? The ones with clever skits highlighting the end user having no idea that their phone had crossed an invisible border and switched from primary to roaming coverage? Immediately incurring increased costs for calling, texting and...

Memcached UDP Reflection Attacks

Akamai is aware of a new DDoS reflection attack vector: UDP-based memcached traffic. Memcached is a tool meant to cache data and reduce strain on heavier data stores, like disk or databases. The protocol allows the server to be queried for information about key value stores and is only intended t...

Your Cache is Exposed

On February 28, Akamai recorded a 1.35 Tbps DDoS attack against one of our customers. The attack was driven by a relatively new vector, memcached reflection. Possibly the largest publicly disclosed DDoS attack to date, the memcached attack was more than twice the size of the largest DDoS attacks...

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...

The Pitfalls of Guest Wi-Fi

Do you remember the days before mobile broadband was commonplace and connection speeds on 2G wireless were barely usable? How often did you seek out a specific location such as a coffee shop or a hotel that offered a free or more likely purchasable Wi-Fi connection? Times have changed. Now, we...

Passing the Online Torch from Rio to PyeongChang

Lighting the Olympic flame marks the beginning of the Olympic Games, commemorating the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus, and connecting the Games to its predecessors. The lighting ceremony has provided some of the Olympic Games' most iconic moments, such as Muhammad Ali...

Passing the Online Torch from Rio to PyeongChang

Lighting the flame marks the beginning of PyeongChang, commemorating the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus, and connecting the games to its predecessors. The lighting ceremony has provided some of the most iconic moments, such as Muhammad Ali lighting the flame in Atlanta i...

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...

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...

Wordpress DoS Attack: CVE-2018-6389

Overview On February 5, an Israeli security researcher, Barak Tawily, discovered a Denial of Service DoS attack impacting all 3.x-4.x versions of the Wordpress content management platform. The vulnerability is currently unpatched and relies on a performance boosting feature in Wordpress allowing...

Micheal McCollough Recognized as 2018 CRN® Channel Chief

This week, Micheal McCollough, Vice President, Global Channels, of Akamai was recognized and named as 2018 Channel Chief by CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company. The executives on this annual list represent top leaders in the IT channel who excel at driving growth and revenue in their organizatio...

Humans, Machines and Data: Fighting Mirai, Together

By Yohai Einav, Hongliang Liu Background It's been 18 months since Mirai entered our lives, and, unfortunately, we expect it to have a perennial presence in our cyber-world for years to come. If we look at the big picture, all indicators suggest that the Mirai problem and its descendants is just...

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...

The New Cyber Landscape: More Threats, But Fewer Security Professionals

Great news: If you're a security professional, your skills have never been more in demand. On the flip side, if you're looking for security talent, the search will likely be lengthy and difficult. ISACA predicts that by 2019 there will be a shortage of two million cyber security professionals...