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WannaCry: What We Know
On Friday, May 12, news agencies around the world reported that a new ransomware threat was spreading rapidly. Akamai's incident response teams and researchers worked quickly to understand this new threat and how to mitigate it. This blog post is a summary of what Akamai knows at this point. Remember that this is still an evolving threat and this information may change. Akamai will update this post as we collect
DDoS Attacks against DNS Infrastructure in the News
DNS-based DDoS attacks have gained mindshare among Akamai customers lately, most recently with last year's Dyn attacks (written about on the Akamai Blog here and here) and this week's attack against Cedexis. DNS infrastructure is a ripe target for malicious actors hoping to disrupt a digital property's availability because it provides the initial resolution for an end user's browser client from hostname to IP address. At best, an attack against
Low Risk Threat: DDoS Extortion Letters
Summary Adversaries calling themselves the Lizard Squad have been sending businesses extortion letters, demanding payment in bitcoin to prevent a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) or other attack against their applications. These letters have been sent to businesses across the globe and across industries for several years, with little follow-through. These letters appear to come from multiple groups including Lizard Squad, the Armada Collective, and DD4BC, though in many case
Update: Vulnerability found in Apache Struts
Akamai has created two new WAF rules in response to new information about the Apache Struts2 vulnerability. The first rule, the most recent version of KRS Rule 3000014, is a standard part of the Kona Ruleset and protects against the many common attacks leveraging this vulnerability. This rule is designed to allow organizations that have complex environments to continue operating without risk of the WAF rule interfering with their environments.
Supply Chain Security: Akamai from a Customer's Risk ...
Managing risk is a key aspect of any business. This becomes more complicated when additional parties, such as vendors are brought into the mix. One of the strongest pieces of guidance on managing vendors that customers have brought to Akamai comes from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) Bulletin 2013-29, wherein the OCC recommended that financial institutions strengthen their preparedness around third-party risk management, particularly in
DDoS of Past, Present and Future
The pervasiveness of technology has meant automation of tasks, allowing better productivity, with more time to do more. However, the dark side of technology would be that enterprises and individuals alike are vulnerable to cybercrimes, compromise of identities, loss of data and subject to malicious attacks. In our recent 'State of the Internet / Security Q4 2016 report', we reported that Akamai mitigated 3,826 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack
The Akamai WAF - Now Protecting APIs
Kona Site Defender is our flagship Web Application Firewall and DDoS Mitigation solution at Akamai. Back in the days of the Al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, Brobot ("It's not OK, bro"), and the "holy 100 Gbps attack!", we had a saying around Akamai: "Kona Site Defender customers come for the DDoS, but they stay for the WAF". The general idea was that it took a headline-grabbing DDoS attack to make customers and
Vulnerability found in Apache Struts
On Monday, March 6th, the Apache team patched a vulnerability in Apache Struts2 framework. Apache Struts is an open-source web application framework for developing Java web applications. The vulnerability exists in the Jakarta Multipart parser, which can be tricked into executing attacker-provided OGNL code. The impacted versions are 2.3.5 through 2.3.31, and 2.5 through 2.5.10 of the Apache Struts framework. If you are currently running an affected version of the
On Web Cache Deception Attacks
Summary On Monday, February 27, 2017, security researcher Omer Gil published a blog post laying out a data exfiltration method called a "Web Cache Deception Attack." The attack leverages web caching functionality to potentially expose sensitive information or allow for account takeover (ATO) attacks. Caching is often used to reduce load and time-to-delivery for a web server receiving requests for content, but this attack shows ways in which, given certain