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...

Algorithms, Alerts, and Akamai Threat Intelligence

Let me start by posing a question: If in one week security solution A produces 120 alerts and security solution B produces 45 alerts, which solution is providing you with more effective protection? The answer is: It depends. On the face of it, solution A appears to be more effective because it's...

Gone Phishing For The Holidays

Written by Or Katz and Amiram Cohen Overview: While our team, Akamai's Enterprise Threat Protector Security Research Team, monitored internet traffic throughout the 2017 holiday season, we spotted a wide-spread phishing campaign targeting users through an advertising tactic. During the six week...

The Botconf Experience

By Yohai Einav, Amir Asiaee, Ali Fakiri-Tabrizi and Alexey Sarychev Originally Posted on January 4, 2018 Earlier this month we took our show on the road, presenting some of our team's work at the Botconf conference in beautiful Montpellier, France. We could talk here for hours about the food, win...

Increased mobile engagement a key catalyst for the best-ever holiday season

2017 was a year of epic proportions that broke numerous retail records worldwide. The stage was set earlier in the year by Amazon's Prime Day, which became Amazon's biggest day ever by generating over $1 Billion in sales 60% increase YoY. This was followed by Singles' Day, during which Alibaba...

A Death Match of Domain Generation Algorithms

By Hongliang Liu and Yuriy Yuzifovich Originally posted on December 29, 2017 Today's post is all about DGA's Domain Generation Algorithms: what they are, why they came into existence, what are some use cases where they are used, and, most importantly - how to detect and block them. As we will...

Impact of Meltdown and Spectre on Akamai

Overview On Wednesday, January 3rd, researchers from Google Project Zero, Cyberus Technology, Graz University of Technology, and other organizations released details about a pair of related vulnerabilities, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. These vulnerabilities appear to affect all modern processors...

Trusted access to Wordpress /wp-admin for content Authors

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as a full content management system, and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. One of the main challenges I have seen with customers is to provide secure access to /wp-admin or /wp-login.php to...

Attack of the Killer ROBOT

On Dec 12th, 2017, researchers Hanno Böck, Juraj Somorovsky and Craig Young published a paper detailing an attack they called the Return Of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Threat ROBOT. This attack, as the name implies, is an extension of an attack published in 1998 that affects systems using certain...

Akamai, Mirai, & The FBI

Through the end of 2016, and throughout 2017, multiple Mirai-based botnets targeted multiple Akamai customers. The very first Mirai attack against Akamai was a multi-day barrage, weighing in at a peak of 620/Gbps that sent shockwaves across the Internet. The same botnet would go on to conduct...

Akamaizing Your Dev & QA Environments

Over the last few months, I've been talking to many development and test teams who deliver their sites and applications through the Akamai Intelligent Platform. One common challenge they face is how to test their Akamai delivery configurations on the Internet against their private development and...

Good News from Singapore

The IETF had its 100th meeting the week of November 13. It was held in Singapore. I want to report on two pieces of good news. The first is that it seems like TLS 1.3 is ready to advance through the IETF process. As I wrote last month, the problem was that outdated or buggy network devices betwee...

Retailers capitalize on mobile experiences to generate record revenue during Black Friday and Cyber Monday

The results are in, Black Friday and Cyber Monday broke all records in 2017 as the total revenue for these days exceeded $11.5 billion. Anticipating that more consumers would shop online, retailers invested in digital experiences and geared up for the holidays by i stocking fewer items in stores ...

Beware of PerformanceTiming.domInteractive

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Beware of PerformanceTiming.domInteractive

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Boost productivity of your DevOps teams and deliver superior digital experiences with Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform - Part 3

In the first and second part of this blog series, we discussed the challenges associated with cloud adoption and how you can leverage Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform, the world's largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform, to achieve the scalability, availability, reliability, security and...

How-To: Replaying Cellular Network Characteristics on Cloud Infrastructure

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What to expect for this year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Last year during holidays, US online sales surpassed $122 billion. This represented a 12 percent increase over the previous year. But beyond the overall growth, what's more interesting is that sales at physical stores dropped by 10 percent, the result of ongoing consumer comfort with and adoption...

What to expect for this year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Last year during holidays, US online sales surpassed $122 billion. This represented a 12 percent increase over the previous year. But beyond the overall growth, what's more interesting is that sales at physical stores dropped by 10 percent, the result of ongoing consumer comfort with and adoption...