In New Delhi: Akamai Technologies has unveiled a new suite of cloud defense solutions aimed at protecting companies from increasingly sophisticated and costly Web attacks. With cyber crime costing global businesses approximately one trillion dollars each year, Akamai is introducing new capabilities for enterprises and cloud computing service providers to further solidify the perimeter defense around their network infrastructure for dynamic web sites and mission-critical business applications.
The Akamai network saw more distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against our customers' Web sites in the fourth quarter of 2010 than in the first three quarters of the year combined, said Tom Leighton, chief scientist and co-founder, Akamai. Companies understand the benefits of the Cloud and continue to push business-critical data and operations there; however, the need to protect these assets from the growing frequency and sophistication of Web attacks increases dramatically as a result.
A recent Forrester survey showed that 74% of surveyed companies experienced one or more DDoS attacks in the past year, with 31% of these attacks resulting in service disruption.
To combat these attacks launched by botnets and other malicious clients and sources, companies need a multi-layered defense architecture that keeps attacks away from their infrastructure.
Akamai is also announcing the bolstering of its Web Application Firewall service, which helps customers comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and provides on-demand scalability for the detection and blocking of malicious Web application attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL injection style attacks. Akamais Web Application Firewall service now offers fast IP blocking and IP rate limiting to further offload unwanted requests and bandwidth outside the data-center.
In December of last year, Akamai observed high volumes of coordinated attacks against five independent Internet Retailer Top 500 customers from Tuesday, November 30th through Thursday, December 2nd. The attacks, causing some Web sites to experience up to 10,000 times their normal daily traffic, were thwarted by the Akamai network. Akamai estimates the attacks could have cost the retailers more than $15 million dollars in lost revenue during the three- day period, had they not been protected. Akamai estimates the attack could have cost the customer $350,000 in lost revenues during the twenty-four hour period, had it not been prevented by Akamai.
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