The Akamai Blog

How long will you wait for something? That depends on what you're waiting for, of course. But in your daily interactions, think about how many "things" you interact with where you expect the response to be instantaneous -- tapping on mobile apps; logging in and transacting with a retailer or a bank; selecting and viewing content on a streaming media device; interacting with a connected device like a light, doorbell, or even a car; or checking in for a train or flight.

Over a year ago, Akamai?s threat research team published research regarding a widely-used phishing toolkit we referred to as the ?Three Question Quiz?. It?s now time to review the evolution of the toolkit, the associated campaigns that we tracked in the wild, and the potential damage caused by those campaigns in the past year.

While we've highlighted both record PPS and BPS attacks mitigated on the Akamai Prolexic Platform over the past few weeks, these attacks are part of a broader trend of increasingly large and complex DDoS activity. We have seen clear indications across the industry of high-water mark DDoS attacks being publicized by multiple vendors. The sheer number of large attacks has been unprecedented. The attacks are also noteworthy for their increasing complexity, illustrated in the number and combinations of different attack vectors. The tenacity of attackers is also increasing -- one Akamai customer experienced 14 separate 100+ Gbps attacks in just the first half of 2020. "What's new is the concept of campaigns. We go back a couple of years, and 'attack' was the right word to use. There were many attacks every single day, but they weren't, in my opinion, campaign-oriented. Some of our more recent ones are campaign-oriented, where the attacker is working in a coordinated way over an extended period of time." -- Roger Barranco, Vice President, Global Security Operations, Akamai Some likely reasons for the rise in attacks are a combination of: The proliferation of DDoS-for-hire tools Emerging botnets (enterprise DVRs, IoT, etc.) entering the scene Plenty of motivating factors across social, geopolitical, and online unrest Quarantine and boredom -- what's a malicious actor supposed to do? Whatever the unique reason of each attack, the result is the same: a security and IT team needs an effective defense.

I joined Akamai Japan in June 2020. Of course, having worked in technology for my whole career, I already knew of Akamai and our strong reputation. I knew it was an intelligent company, with impressive technology, and - above all - a great story that really inspired me.

Since March, the COVID crisis has caused massive disruption to every area of life and work. It has tested us, as individuals and as a business. Akamai has taken a very human-centric approach during the pandemic. Our guiding principle has been to do what is right for the health and safety of employees, customers and partners. I feel proud of this, because when I think about what I'm grateful for, it really does come down to people. I'm grateful to be working for a company that is keeping people connected to the world through technology. I'm grateful to be among smart, immensely resilient colleagues. And I'm grateful to have friends and family who are sticking together. Ultimately, it's the humanity that matters.

On June 21, 2020, Akamai mitigated the largest packet per second (PPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever recorded on the Akamai platform. The attack generated 809 million packets per second (Mpps), targeting a large European bank.

Micro-segmentation is the central IT security best practice response to overly-permissive policies. Learn how to do it right.

always surprises me how easily a community can adapt to a new situation or reality. What was once considered an outlier or even an unimaginable situation can quickly become our new normal. For those of us focused on protecting enterprises from threats, that also couldn't be more accurate. Specifically for the Akamai team working on our Prolexic platform in our Security Operations Command Center (SOCC), mitigating many distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks a day has resulted in increasingly sophisticated automated tooling and expert-level know-how through mitigating these constant attacks.

always surprises me how easily a community can adapt to a new situation or reality. What was once considered an outlier or even an unimaginable situation can quickly become our new normal. For those of us focused on protecting enterprises from threats, that also couldn't be more accurate. Specifically for the Akamai team working on our Prolexic platform in our Security Operations Command Center (SOCC), mitigating many distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks a day has resulted in increasingly sophisticated automated tooling and expert-level know-how through mitigating these constant attacks.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Continuous Delivery methods have become increasingly popular amongst development and operations teams as a means of maintaining high-performing websites.

Guardicore Labs has recently picked up Bondnet, a botnet of thousands of compromised servers of varying power. Managed and controlled remotely, the Bondnet is currently used to mine different cryptocurrencies and is ready to be weaponized immediately for other purposes such as mounting DDoS attacks as shown by the Mirai Botnet. Among the botnet?s victims are high profile global companies, universities, city councils and other public institutions.

By: Larry Cashdollar Malware that can target Windows and Linux systems was recently installed on my honeypot. After some investigation, I determined it to be similar to the malware discovered in February of 2019 by Malwarebytes, and later examined by...

Kerry Condon is Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Akamai Technologies. With more than 20 years' experience as a strategic human resources leader across emerging and developed markets, she shares her take on how candidates can put their best foot forward during these unusual times.

Learn how microsegmentation allows financial institutions to achieve goals, from automation to streamlining firewall compliance, while protected.

The internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack is used to form domain names that visually resemble legitimate domain names, albeit, using a different set of characters [1]. For example, the IDN

On May 2, 2020, Akamai blocked a large PPS-focused attack against one of our financial services customers in 0 seconds, utilizing a proactive mitigation posture. This was one of the largest PPS levels we have on record, and the biggest mitigated to date in 0 seconds. The attacker launched a bevy of minimally sized UDP packets in an attempt to overwhelm network gear in the customer's data center.

Hello all! I'm Nicole Fitzpatrick, Deputy General Counsel at Akamai. I also sit on the D&I Executive Steering Committee. Normally I'd be in our Cambridge office about now, but like so many of us I am working from home and writing this surrounded by four kids, the dog and my husband (not written in particular order of importance, by the way).

Introduction In our previous post, The Building Wave of Internet Traffic, we looked at the traffic patterns across Europe and the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had. We examined traffic in Italy, Poland, and Spain, and demonstrated how we observed...

Researchers at Akamai have identified a new phishing campaign targeting users in Brazil who are worried about their finances during the COVID-19 epidemic. Over two weeks, we identified that the three-question quiz campaign successfully targeted more than 850,000 victims, scamming them out of personal information, and in some cases, convincing them to install Adware on their computer.

By now, we are all subject in one way or another to the far-reaching impact of COVID-19. As we see on the news each day, the numbers of those infected by this deadly coronavirus continue to grow in terrifying increments. And even for those of us without family members or friends directly impacted by the virus, life has profoundly changed.