Akamai Cloud Security Intelligence Provides Foundation for Security Services

Сloud Security

Unprecedented Visibility Equates to Greater Accuracy, Faster Response to Web Attacks

April 14, 2015

4 Min Read

PRESS RELEASE

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – April 14, 2015 – Recognizing the crucial role data analytics play in more effectively fighting cloud security threats, Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services, today unveiled the foundation underpinning its award-winning Cloud Security Solutions. Known as Akamai Cloud Security Intelligence, a data processing engine within the Akamai Intelligent Platform, the engine is used to continuously analyze more than two Petabytes of data related to web security threats. Akamai uses the resulting intelligence to not only continuously update and improve the Kona Site Defender application security rule set, but also provides the framework around which innovative offerings, such as the newly available Kona Client Reputation solution are built.

In an increasingly hostile and complex online environment, protecting web properties from potentially harmful activities can be daunting. For security professionals, understanding the "true intent" of web clients, as well as how to counter the ever-changing nature of attack vectors, is crucial to protecting their organizations' websites and applications. Through the ability to analyze more than 20 Terabytes of daily web attack traffic associated with hundreds of millions of unique IP addresses on an hourly basis,, the Akamai Cloud Security Intelligence is designed to provide more comprehensive insight into how malicious actors are attacking web properties, which in turn can be used to inform the direction of Akamai's Cloud Security Solutions.

Security professionals can benefit from the power of Akamai's Cloud Security Intelligence through two newly introduced offerings:

Kona Client Reputation: Akamai's unprecedented view of web traffic gives the Company access to more web client data than any other security provider. That data, combined with a proprietary query language and advanced heuristics and algorithms creates a reputation "score" for every IP address that crosses the platform. As important, this score can adapt over time, based on ongoing data analysis of IP address activity. Potentially hazardous traffic is classified as DDoS attackers, vulnerability scanners, web attackers or web scrapers and further rated according to the likelihood of danger associated with the client. The rating system is specifically designed to give security professionals greater insight and flexibility in defining which clients to block and which to let through. Further, by injecting scores into request headers, Kona Client Reputation data can feed into back-end security systems. Internal testing of Kona Client Reputation shows the solution is able to stop an average of up to eight times as many malicious requests than using Kona Site Defender alone. Kona Client Reputation is deployed as an add on option to Akamai Kona Site Defender.

One organization already benefitting from Kona Client Reputation is leading office supply retailer Staples. According to Brian MacKinnon, a senior security consultant, Ecommerce, at the company, "Client Reputation has been critical in helping us make quicker and more informed security decisions, improving our ability to effectively protect our sites from attack and data theft. Akamai provides us new visibility about malicious traffic at our fingertips and helps watch over us when and where we’re not looking."

Improved Kona Rule Set: Responding to a consistently evolving threat landscape requires the agility to quickly block malicious activity without hampering legitimate traffic. Already proven to deliver industry leading false positive and false negative rates, the improved Kona Rule Set has been developed based on ongoing analysis of more than two Petabytes of security-related data delivered by Akamai Cloud Security Intelligence and conducted by Akamai's threat research team. The resulting Kona Rule Set, which is available to all Kona Site Defender customers at no additional cost, has shown an approximately 30 percent decrease in reporting false positives and false negatives, helping security professionals ensure that more malicious traffic is being blocked while at the same time allowing more legitimate traffic to pass.

"Companies around the world have come to rely on Akamai's Cloud Security Solutions to keep their web sites and applications not only up and running, but also highly performant, in the face of attack," explained John Summers, vice president, Cloud Security, Akamai. "The Akamai Cloud Security Intelligence data analysis engine provides a solid foundation from which we're able to make our existing Akamai Cloud Security Solutions even smarter and provide a framework upon which new cloud security solutions can be built. The ultimate goal is to continue delivering technology designed to keep our customers’ online businesses protected in the face of an ever changing threat landscape."

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