Every day, each of us us uses the services of Akamai, perhaps without realizing it. The Akamai content delivery network is a global network distributed in over 130 countries with over 240,000 servers. The task of these servers is to make website content available in a secure, fast and distributed manner. In practice, when using a CDN, the heavier content is "loaded" to the Akamai servers, and when a user accesses a web page in a completely transparent manner, the CDN provides images and videos instead of the server that hosts the site, which will continue to engage in web pages generation and related services. The Akamai network's capillarity, which embodies the very concept of edge, makes immediate use of content anywhere in the world, which for the website owner would be very costly and even complex to manage.
Akamai: safety first The Akamai platform is structured to ensure the highest level of security in addition to dealing with content distribution. On Edge9, we have often reported that today the landscape of cybercrime has become very complex. It emerged during the Akamai Security Summit that 75 percent of cyber attacks have economic goals and that the turnover of the worldwide cyber crime is € 1.400 billion. There are real criminal organizations with figures like this behind the attacks, with huge resources available and the very in-depth skills of the different methods of attack.
Therefore, countering the increasingly sophisticated threats and for certain types of attack technology alone is not enough for a company with its own IT resources. Because anyone who attacks, adapts, changes real-time strategies, studies countermeasures and modifies attack methods to find a weak point.
To counter this type of threats, Akamai has created a team at European level that takes advantage of the traffic management experience gained. Throughout the Akamai content delivery network, 30 percent of global web traffic transits are developed to face any type of attack from the ongoing analysis of these data skills.
Safety comes from both people and technology We met Stefano Buttiglione, Service Line Manager, EMEA, during the Akamai Security Summit, who showed us an unknown aspect of combating cyber crime. The context is that of a growing number of attacks. Akamai detected 3.5 billion attacks on more than 200,000 different domain names in the first quarter of 2019 alone. With 29 percent, the largest number of attacks originated in Russia and the most frequent type of attack in 94 percent of cases was SQL Injection. The most affected sector is the 35 percent retail sector.
An increasingly used instrument for launching attacks is that of bots that imitate human behavior in order not to detect and launch attacks on the target site. Here are some people who in real time change the behavior of the bots to adapt to the countermeasures that those who try to defend themselves are putting in place. And this is precisely the ongoing war's new aspect. Because if those who attack are people using bot technology to overcome defenses, technology, on the other hand, is not enough to fight them. Stefano Buttiglione cited the example of an airline website that the fare search service attacked by bots. A real battle broke out between the hacker group and the Akamai team, which lasted for a few weeks, leading to a substantial reduction in the airline website's fraudulent traffic.