Finding Needles in Haystacks: Using Data and Analytics to effectively counter Attacks on the Web

In the latest Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls, Akamai was positioned in the Leaders quadrant. And while it’s always gratifying to be recognized for your accomplishments, it’s even more gratifying to know that your customers are benefitting from their use of the innovative solutions your company is bringing to market.

This is especially true in website and application security.

Today’s online businesses are facing a perfect storm. A proliferation of insecure, Internet-enabled devices, combined with inexpensive compute, means that it has never been cheaper or easier to launch devastating attacks against anyone doing business online. Everyone is a potential target – from the biggest international brands, to small local businesses.

Perhaps more frightening is that as the size and complexity of attacks increase, most organizations don’t have the resources – either people or technology – to effectively fight them. And, this is all happening at a time when the impact of a DDoS or a data breach has also grown significantly. How do you transact business if your service is down? How do you rebuild trust if your customer information is stolen?

My colleague recently posted here about why pure-play cloud WAF technology was the way to go in fighting modern threats against websites and applications. There’s one key element – intelligence – that he touched on that I’d like to expand upon a bit.

Getting really smart about website and application attacks and attackers is the only way to get really good at defending against them. But the challenge to getting really smart is that tracking down all the data you need is like finding millions of needles hiding in billions of haystacks. And once you find them all, you need to sort them out into something that makes sense.

You need to turn the relevant data you’ve uncovered into intelligence – actionable intelligence that can help you mount the best defenses possible. The problem in all of this? Most companies are ill equipped to do what’s necessary to find all the needles in all the haystacks and then do something meaningful with what they’ve found.

That’s where Akamai comes in. Akamai operates the world’s largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform. We see a ton of what happens on the Internet. We see attacks. We see trends. We see how devices are being used for malicious intent. We also see – and can separate out – the good traffic. We know how it behaves. How it’s different than the bad.

Akamai finds the needles so you don’t have to.

And more importantly, we analyze the needles. We apply machine learning. We apply human learning gained from our years of experience fighting web attacks. We generate real insight into what is happening in the wild. We learn how attacks evolve. And we learn the best, most effective ways to stop them in their tracks. The many Petabytes of log data that we collect and analyze on a daily basis makes this possible.

We do it all to protect our customers and ultimately the customers with whom they do business.

And because the attackers keep getting smarter Akamai will continue to invest in our cloud security intelligence. They can try to hide all the needles in all the haystacks they want. Akamai will keep working every day to find them all.