Akamai has expanded its cloud-hosted range of security products to better defend against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
The suite of services provides tools to counter distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. It uses Akamai's network of 84,000 servers globally to deal with these attacks, offer fail-over service and provide a number of further features to protect websites, the company announced on Tuesday.
"Akamai's highly distributed, multi-network platform makes it possible for enterprises to combat today's internet threats in a unique, innovative way that no centralised solution can offer," Bruno Hourdel, Akamai's product line director for International, said in a statement. "Hackers are increasingly targeting companies and websites with more sophisticated and coordinated attacks."
DDoS attacks target websites or specific internet protocol (IP) addresses with a flood of data requests, causing an outage. The attack method is a favourite of hacker activist group Anonymous.
Features of the DDoS defence architecture include the ability to block traffic by geographic origin; a cap on customers' exposure to attack-mitigation fees, which scale with the attack; the ability to hide a site's core servers from the public internet; dynamic identification and sorting of attack traffic and valid traffic; and scalable protection from Domain Name System (DNS) attacks.
Akamai also expanded its cloud firewall service for web applications, which launched in December 2009. The new features broaden defence against application layer attacks via IP blocking and IP rate limiting to identity and block or throttle specific computers.
The tools are expected to be added to Akamai's services in the second quarter of 2011, Akamai said. Prices were not disclosed.
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