The Akamai Blog

The Domain Name System (DNS) tools “whoami.akamai.net” and its alias “whoami.akamai.com” have been used for many years, often as a step in the process for diagnosing how a content delivery network (CDN) is directing traffic, locality, and network reachability issues. Whoami was originally introduced as a quick solution that, as often happens, ended up sticking around for far longer than expected.

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 can result in noisy false positive security events, which can eventually mask real attacks from being detected and blocked. What is Web Security Analytics? Akamai's new Web Security Analytics tool provides a single unified and efficient interface to assess a wide range of security events, perform analysis of events, and evaluate any needed changes in order to maintain an optimal security configuration. For example, customers can use this tool to better:

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 development of new systems based on existing capabilities.

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,...

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

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 that were launched against an Akamai customer by the operators of the Mirai botnet in September of 2016.

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...

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 devices running malicious applications and is designed to create DDoS traffic. The botnet is sometimes associated with ransom notes to targets.

In the DevOps world, getting a consistent development environment is crucial. In this post, I'll show you how to set up a virtual Python environment and install the correct libraries to achieve a consistent development environment.

The following is a select list of questions and answers that we hope will shed more light on the botnet.

In this "unofficial" video series, Akamai Solutions Engineers Tedd Smith and CJ Arnesen explain the basics of caching: what it is, why it's important, and how to get the most out of it. A great introduction to Akamai, caching, and content delivery network (CDN) basics, this series supplements Akamai Quick Starts and User Guides to help you level set new team members and other departments within your organization.

As Samba is used as part of many organizations storage systems, we will discuss the impact of the vulnerability on organizations and home users.

In this post we will describe how GGSN detected a wide ransomware attack targeting MySQL databases and provide recommendations on how to protect your database.

Most people in the performance engineering field agree that our skillset is derived from an intersection of disciplines that include testing, optimization, and systems engineering.

With the Black Friday, Cyber Monday holiday weekend upon us, retailers in the U.S. and abroad are preparing for another peak period for customer acquisition and commerce revenues. In 2016, the U.S. eCommerce market is the second largest globally and...