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...

Are you ready for the holidays?

It's November, which means the holiday season is upon us and retailers are working tirelessly to get their websites, apps and infrastructures ready to deliver a secure and exceptional customer experience during the peak holiday season. If past data is any indication of things to come, 2017 promis...

Do you believe in Serendipity?

In December 2016, after a month of mountain bike racing and touring in Nepal, I commenced the Executive Program in General Management at MIT. The first term was at Sloan School of Management in Cambridge and for the first time in my life, I finally could relate to studying. In fact, I was even...

Deliver secure digital experiences using Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform - Part 2

In the first part of this blog series, we discussed how you can leverage Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform, the world's largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform, to achieve the scalability, availability, reliability and performance needed to deliver superior digital experiences and maximize...

Layered Security Without the Layered Complexity

With the recent influx of news reports regarding security incidents, more Chief Information Security Officers CISOs, Chief Information Officers CIOs, and IT professionals are reviewing current security infrastructures, policies, and practices to identify potential weaknesses in their security...

Reduce cloud adoption risks and deliver superior digital experiences with Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform - Part 1

Businesses are rapidly moving to the cloud and a recent IDG survey indicates that 70% of businesses have at least 1 application in the cloud and 16% plan to take their first app to the cloud in the next 12 months. However public cloud providers present their own challenges. They are unreliable...

Maximize security insights by integrating threat intelligence data from Akamai with your SIEM

Since 2005, when Gartner coined the term, SIEM Security Information and Event Management solutions have grown in importance for the security industry. SIEM solutions provide a centralized view to easily access and analyze security information from multiple sources, and then prioritize mitigation...

What You Need To Know About The "ROCA" vulnerability

By Daniel Franke, Infosec Researcher Akamai is aware of the recently-disclosed "ROCA" vulnerability in cryptographic firmware used in products made by Infineon Technologies. A bug in the firmware's prime-search algorithm used for RSA key generation results in RSA keys that are relatively cheap an...

Let's Get Visual: Best Practices for Digital Image Management

"Offering rich, interactive images has emerged as a critical component to any website or web app visitor engagement strategy -- and with good reason," wrote Parag Pathak, our Senior Product Marketing Manager, in his recent published article - Let's get visual: best practices for digital image...

I can Haz TLS 1.3 ?

Everybody wants to be able to use TLS 1.3. Among the reasons are: It's faster - being able to reconnect to a server you've previously used, and saving a full round-trip latency is impressive. It's more reliable - the protocol has been cleaned up and simplified. For example, the related concepts o...

Fast Flux Botnet: Research Results

Just like that, another Akamai Edge has come and gone. If you were able to join us this year, I hope you had a chance to stop by my presentation on Threat Intelligence Insights: An In-Depth Analysis of a Fast Flux Botnet. In short, Fast Flux is a DNS technique used by botnets to hide various type...

Regain reliability and control over the cloud with Application Load Balancer

It's no secret that businesses are rapidly adopting Cloud Service Providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform for cost efficiency, agility, scalability and global distribution to serve their customers more easily. A recent IDG survey indicates that 70% of...

Regain reliability and control over the cloud with Application Load Balancer

It's no secret that businesses are rapidly adopting Cloud Service Providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform for cost efficiency, agility, scalability and global distribution to serve their customers more easily. A recent IDG survey indicates that 70% of...

KRACK Vulnerability in WiFi WPA2

Akamai is aware of a family of vulnerabilities known as the Key Reinstallation Attack or KRACK. These vulnerabilities abuse implementation flaws found in all modern wireless networks using WPA2. The KRACK attack is effective at the protocol level and therefore affects all systems using current Wi...

Akamai's Leading Role in the DNS Renaissance

In case you haven't been paying attention, an unlikely technology, the Internet's Domain Name System, or DNS, is experiencing a renaissance. For much of its existence, DNS has maintained a simple and singular function - to resolve Internet names to IP addresses. Over the past several years,...

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...

Introduction to DNS Data Exfiltration

Written by Asaf Nadler and Avi Aminov Spyware is a malicious software malware used to gather information about a person or organization without their consent. In a typical setting, a remote server, that acts as a command and control server C&C, waits for an incoming connection from the spyware th...

Introduction to DNS Data Exfiltration

Written by Asaf Nadler and Avi Aminov Updated 2/14/19 After the initial publication of this blog post, Asaf Nadler and Avi Aminov wrote a paper on the detection of malicious and low throughput data exfiltration over the DNS protocol. The...

Taking the Fight Where It Belongs

This Guest blog was written by Robert Mahowald, a Group Vice President at IDC who leads IDC's Worldwide Applications research practice, in addition to co-leading IDC's Cloud Services: Global Overview program. A surprising set of facts emerged from the most recent quarterly installment of IDC's...

Akamai Prioritizes People Safety and Continuity of Service during Hurricane Irma

Written by Mani Sundaram, SVP Global Services & Support; Francis Trentley, VP Security Services & Support; Roger Barrango, Director Global Security Operations. Hurricane Irma affected millions this week. As always here at Akamai, taking care of people comes first, and the wellbeing of our team wa...

When Looking for SWIFT Audit Guidelines, Beware of the Customer Security Controls Framework

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Choosing the right application access solution for a hybrid IT world

This Guest blog was written by Martha Gomez Vazquez, a Senior Research Analyst for IDC's Infrastructure Services research practice focusing on Security Services and Hardware & Software Support and Deployment. The widespread success of security breaches over the past few years has proven beyond a...

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...

Akamai's DNS Contribution to Internet Resiliency

Background Akamai Technologies recently contributed its "Serve Stale" DNS algorithm to Version 9 of the Internet Systems Consortium's ISC Berkeley Internet Name Domain BIND open source Domain Name System DNS project. As the Internet's most widely used DNS implementation, BIND operates ubiquitousl...

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...

Girls Who Code: That's a Wrap!

The Summer Immersion Program for Girls Who Code at Akamai wrapped up this past week. The girls finished their final projects and presented them at a graduation ceremony attended by friends and family as well as supporters and mentors from Akamai. The girls were divided into five teams for their...

Game Crunch Doesn't Always Have to be a Thing

You've been dreading the conversation. You know there's no way out of it, given the timeline. Your execs have made it clear that the very large marketing spend is going to hit during the week when two of your engineers were planning to be on vacation. You've got a brilliant team that has helped y...

The WireX Botnet: An example of cross-organizational cooperation

Introduction On August 17th, 2017, multiple Content Delivery Networks CDNs and content providers were subject to significant attacks from a botnet dubbed WireX. The botnet is named for an anagram for one of the delimiter strings in its command and control protocol. The WireX botnet comprises...

The WireX Botnet: An Example of Cross-Organizational Cooperation

On August 17th, 2017, multiple Content Delivery Networks CDNs and content providers were subject to significant attacks from a botnet dubbed WireX. The botnet is named for an anagram for one of the delimiter strings in its command and control protocol. The WireX botnet comprises primarily Android...

What makes a good "DNS Blacklist"? - Part 2

In "What makes a good 'DNS Blacklist'? - Part 1", we explored the background and factors that have gone into Akamai's thinking behind New security products like Enterprise Threat Protect ETP. This article continues with a list of factors and questions to ask any DNS Threat Feed providers, includi...

What makes a good "DNS Blacklist"? - Part 1

Reflections on Modern Actionable Threat Intelligence used to turn a DNS Resolver into a Critical Security Tool Akamai has just launched the Enterprise Threat Protection ETP platform. ETP is built on Akamai's global AnswerX Cloud that now reaches 28 countries and is expanding to new countries ever...

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...

Access and Delivery different sides of the same coin

We are often so caught up in our own realities that we miss obvious similarities or synergies. Luckily when various people look at the same situation, different perspectives emerge. I was reminded of that recently during a conversation with one of our large pharma customers. Akamai helps our...