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Is DNS Your Security Achilles Heel?
Executive Summary With the constant drumbeat of news reports about security breaches, cyber security is hard to ignore. Organizations understand that they need comprehensive solutions that prevent, detect, and respond to security threats. They often implement multiple layers of security controls to protect their IT systems.
Petya Runs Wild
As has been widely reported, a new ransomware known as 'petya' (also being referred to as `notpetya` or `petwrap` in the research community) started circulating on the internet earlier this week. It appears the attacks started in Eastern Europe and caused widespread damage around the globe.
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 does not work. Operators (Carriers, ISPs, Cloud Operators, Mobile Operators, etc) really need to put the robustness
Why You Should Care About DNS Latency
The term latency is used a lot in networking and most commonly refers to how long it takes a packet to reach a destination and come back again. The most common tools for measuring network latency are ping and traceroute, but there are more. When I speak to operators around Asia Pacific about DNS though, it's interesting to hear that latency is not often used when benchmarking or measuring their
Akamai Launches New Solution to Help Enterprise Secu ...
Today, we are proud to introduce Akamai Enterprise Threat Protector (ETP). ETP is designed to provide customers quick-to-deploy and easy-to-manage cloud-based protection against the impact of complex, targeted threats such malware, ransomware, phishing, and DNS‑based data exfiltration. One organization already seeing the benefit of using Enterprise Threat Protector is innovator in cruise travel, Norwegian Cruise Line. According to Fidel Perez, the company's Director of Enterprise Architecture and Performance, "An important
The Importance of DNS in Security - Part 2
In my last blog post, part 1 of this series, I discussed the important role DNS plays in protecting service provider networks from DNS amplification attacks, and the necessity of not only blocking malicious queries but also of not blocking good queries. In this post, I'll look at Pseudo-Random Subdomain (PRSD) attacks and other malware (like phishing and ransomware), showing why DNS is perfectly suited to protect both networks and
The Importance of DNS in Security - Part 1
The importance of the DNS security protocol, in general, is widely understood, particularly in today's overall security landscape. Anyone who currently manages (or has managed) caching/recursive or authoritative DNS servers knows the pain it causes when they go down. It's bad. Without available DNS there is no internet, at least no usable internet. Generally, most, if not all applications today rely on DNS to locate resources somewhere on the internet
Advanced, Targeted Threats: What do They Mean for Yo ...
Too often, we are so focused on our day-to-day that we neglect to consider the bigger picture. I have been writing about recursive DNS and threat intelligence, Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs), and DNS-based data exfiltration assuming that the vast majority of readers are familiar with the business impact of malware, ransomware, and phishing. Turns out, that isn't necessarily the case.
20 Years of DNS Data Exfiltration: Why, How, and Wh ...
In the last few posts, I talked about why recursive DNS (rDNS) combined with threat intelligence makes for such a simple-to-deploy security solution that effectively mitigates and prevents advanced, targeted threats. Not to belabor the point, but the recent punycode phishing news makes the effectiveness of rDNS plus threat intel even more evident. Identifying punycode domains lexically through a combination of rDNS and threat intel is quite straightforward, either by