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...

To Keep Players Happy, First Seek Understanding

Me: To keep your players happy - you need to understand why they're not. You: Uh, yeah obviously. Thanks. So what? Actually, I have a lot to say on the topic of keeping players happy. A few months back I wrote a quick post about Friction. Friction, as I defined it, is anything that prompts your...

Akamai Is Named A Leader In Gartner's Magic Quadrant For Web Application Firewalls

"Don't work for recognition, but do work worthy of recognition" - H. Jackson Brown. A friend sent this quote to me after I explained to her my ambivalence about being recognized by Gartner as a "Leader" in their Web Application Firewall Magic Quadrant. I had mixed feelings because I wanted to...

Girls Who Code at Akamai, Week 5: Designing the User Experience!

Week 5 of the Girls Who Code program at Akamai was action-packed. The class attended a User-Experience UX workshop onsite at Akamai's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. The instructors, formerly of Twitter and currently Google UX experts, led the girls through an activity in which they designed the...

Part 2: Reading SPAM For Research

A couple weeks ago, I posted a blog that is a follow up of an article I published in Information Security Magazine. In that post I wrote about collecting phishing samples and identifying domain squatters that might be looking to harvest information from their target. This is the final blog entry...

Girls Who Code Weeks 3 and 4: Robots, the Internet and College

The summer is flying by, and we have reached the mid-point of our Girls Who Code Summer Immersion program. Our students are smart, engaged, learning a ton, and seem to be having a lot of fun! Last week was about robotics. The girls wired and programmed Arduino robots to perform a variety of tasks...

Get Ready For The Holidays With Cloudlets

It's summer, which means it's time for hitting the beach, enjoying outdoor barbeques with friends and family, going for hiking, biking, kayaking and savoring cold craft beers. But for savvy retailers like you, summer is the ideal time to start getting your apps, websites and infrastructures ready...

Larry's Cabinet of Web Vulnerability Curiosities

One of my responsibilities as a member of the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team SIRT is to research new web application vulnerabilities. For the last year, I have focused on Wordpress plugin vulnerabilities, and looking for any interesting code tidbits in my box of Wordpress toys. There...

Winning at Launch Time

Your extraordinary work on game development through concept to crunch, your tireless community building, brand awareness, and engagement all converge on one moment: Launching the game. Is it possible to ever finish building a video game? The longer the dev cycle, the more likely it is you'll run...

Part 1: Reading SPAM for Research

I recently wrote an article for Information Security Magazine where I explained how internet security researchers could use their spam folders as a resource tool. It got me thinking about going into greater detail on what I've found in my inbox. Phishing Sites I noticed an increase in "free gift...

Girls Who Code Week 2: Let the Coding Begin!!

The Akamai-sponsored Girls Who Code program is well under way! Week 2 featured lots of activity in the Girls Who Code classroom at Akamai's Cambridge, MA headquarters. The girls learned to use Scratch, a visual programming language that was developed at MIT to help people learn to code. They used...

Don't Say Goodbye to Your OTT Viewers

Takes a second to say goodbye Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh It takes a second to say goodbye Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh, say bye bye Where you going to now When U2 penned the lyrics to its song, "Seconds," in 1983, there was no such thing as online video. In fact, video had killed the radio star only four...

The Myth of the self tuning / machine learning Web Application Firewall

There's an old adage that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. If you're like me, you can apply this to your own experiences. For example, about 5 years ago a small chain of gyms that exclusively used vibrating exercise machines popped up near my home. Their gym goers would sta...

Unwelcome Interruptions

Imagine your player's first experience with your game. Finally, after waiting all these years, she's got the game in hand. She tears the cellophane, cracks the case, slots the disc, and . . . "Game is now updating. Please wait." Watching 20 GB load onto a machine is not anyone's idea of fun. I ha...

Superior and safe user experiences with the Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform

Your customers are unique and they all expect fast, secure, personalized digital experiences. They are spread across the world, in regions of varying network connectivity, utilize a plethora of devices and screen sizes - making it challenging to deliver your experiences. By delivering 95 Exabytes...

Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program - Week One

Written by Lisa Adams The Girls Who Code Summer Immersion program at Akamai Technologies is off to a great start! During Week 1 we welcomed the class of 20 girls and the teaching team of three instructors from Girls Who Code. The girls began learning how to program in the Scratch language, and...

The Slippery Slope Starts with "Get 2 Free Airline Tickets"

Written by Or Katz and Raviv Perets A widespread phishing scam that offers free airline tickets has been spotted in the wild by Akamai's Enterprise Threat Protector ETP security research team. The campaign uses a number of social engineering techniques to trick people into providing their private...

AnswerX - Akamai's 'Secret' DNS Platform

As I work with Operators all over the world, I'm amazed at two worrying. First, Operators are still treating DNS as an afterthought. Everyone knows that if DNS is down, the network is down. Too many people are taking DNS's resiliency for granted. DNS "just works" is assumed to be norm until it do...

Dealing with Petya

Akamai is aware of and is tracking the malware threat known as "Petya". Petya is ransomware spread using several methods, including PSexec, Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line WMIC, and the EternalBlue exploit used by the WannaCry family of ransomware. The malware spreads via port 139...