The Akamai Blog

The beginning of a new year is a time to look back and reflect on the previous one. December 31st is also the end date of our annual Krakow Internship Program.

Cloudlets Policy Manager often takes a long time to load, which is a by-product of its original design where every policy activation is an individual file. These files must be moved around the network, and as you might imagine, transferring thousands of files in a multi-tenant network can take a very long time. Add a synchronous API to this problem, and we quickly get into a situation where the Policy Manager UI can freeze until a back-end transfer operation times out.

DigiGirlz is an initiative organized by Microsoft to engage girls in technological education and careers. The initiative, which launched in 2000, consists of two main programs: DigiGirlz Day and High Tech Camp. This program has been a cornerstone of Microsoft's community engagement for more than 20 years, but this year the events were in jeopardy of being cancelled because of the pandemic. So, what do you do when your passion for helping others meets a challenge? You do what Microsoft does so well -- you innovate!

Isn't it amazing how seemingly simple decisions can have far-reaching effects? When the Inverse team in Montreal took over PacketFence in 2008, it was an open source (OS) solution.

Akamai is committed to collaboration that inspires worldwide change. We know it's not enough to be environmentally conscious solely in our own business. To make a true impact on climate change, we need to use our unique position as a global corporation to encourage our partners to join us in taking sustainable action, participating in community improvement projects, and engaging in climate education. We need to consider the question:

Author: Mark Porter, Director, Supply Chain & International Collaboration, Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA) Mark Porter moved to REBA from Rocky Mountain Institute's Business Renewables Center (BRC) initiative in March 2019. Mark continues to support the BRC initiative across all areas and grow REBA's membership. He is developing initiatives to support supply chain engagement and international collaboration between NGOs acting in this space worldwide.

This is Part 3 of a 3-part blog series highlighting some of the distinguishing aspects of Akamai's authoritative DNS services, Edge DNS and Global Traffic Management. Part 1 focused on Akamai's DNS platform and what sets it apart. Part 2...

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues are quickly emerging as a key concern for investors. To use a musical analogy, the bow is just resting on the first string, with more notes sure to follow. At Akamai, our ESG instrument is well tuned and ready for the symphony to come, as evidenced by our 2020 Sustainability Report released this week.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post trying to explain, with humor, why choosing application security as a career path is destiny derived by my parents calling me "Or", and why a personal name that is a conditional word can sometimes be challenging in daily routines, since some attack payloads contain conditional words.

By now, we hope you've read Monday's and Tuesday's blog posts announcing the release of our annual sustainability report, our sustainability program, and the technical innovation behind it.

This post will focus on the weaponization of a few of the exploits only, as Sarit and Ofir documented everything else.

When we write the SOTI and talk about attacks against gamers, we spend a good deal of time focusing on network-level events, such as DDoS and credential stuffing.

In this blog, we will take a look at and break down a recent Magecart attack detected and mitigated by Client-Side Protection & Compliance. The impacted customer operates a large international e-commerce business in which one of its websites was compromised with a malicious script.

Never before has the risk of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack been higher. In 2020, we saw record-breaking attacks, a DDoS extortion campaign impacting thousands of organizations globally, more emergency customer turnups, and more Akamai customers attacked than any year on record -- and we've been successfully fighting DDoS attacks since 2003! We also saw a big increase in attacks targeting verticals that haven't seen as much activity of late, with 7 of 11 of the industries we track seeing peak attack counts in 2020.

I recently worked with a client whose large e-commerce site was hosted with a popular cloud-based commerce solution. Its business was growing rapidly into new geographic markets, and it was not satisfied with the embedded content delivery network (eCDN) that was bundled with the cloud solution. We demonstrated that stacking CDNs -- adding Akamai's Ion solution on top of the eCDN -- could significantly improve performance as well as provide the client with much greater control over its delivery configuration

Over the past 20 years, we've seen a lot of growth at Akamai. When I started at Akamai, we used to have traffic peaks of almost 200 Mbps. From that fledgling startup, Akamai has now grown to such a scale that we almost doubled network capacity in 2020 and were able to serve peaks of almost 200 Tbps. In short, just like the internet, Akamai has undergone quite the evolution. But as we've grown, so have our environmental impacts. In fact, the internet as a whole is responsible for more than 2% of global emissions, having the same impact as the airline industry. Our online streaming, learning, working, shopping, and playing habits have all started to add up.

Last year proved to be a year like no other. We faced unforeseen challenges, including adjusting to a new way of working, collaborating, and conducting business. It is an honor for me to announce the Akamai Partners of the Year for 2020 who went above and beyond in this tumultuous year. These awards recognize Akamai Partner Program (APP) partners that consistently delivered significant sales successes, innovative solution partnerships, and unequaled service levels as they adapted to the new norm of digital transformation.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard ?unprecedented? in 2020, I could fund a clean energy project myself. And while we're tired of hearing this term, it's true amid the pandemic, U.S. presidential election, social justice movements, finalization of Brexit, and many other new and life-changing events that took place this past year.

Live news streaming traffic during the Biden inauguration ceremony on January 20 peaked at 12 Tbps on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. The peak, which occurred as now-President Biden was taking the oath of office just before 12 PM ET, is roughly 8x higher than what we typically see for mid-day traffic on a weekday. However, it's still less than the 18 Tbps we observed during 2020 election night on November 3.

If you turned on a new game console and/or downloaded video games over the holidays, you certainly weren't alone. New data from Akamai shows that game-related traffic delivered across our network was more than double the Q4 average on December 25, and up nearly 50% on December 26. During the same period, traffic for all other industries combined was relatively even compared to the rest of the quarter.