Content delivery network and cloud provider Akamai Technologies has expanded the way users of hybrid DNS infrastructure can protect themselves against resource exhaustion attacks.
The company said in a statement it was launching Akamai Shield NS53 to protect on-premises DNS infrastructure against attacks which tie up systems to the extent that they cannot respond to valid queries.
Akamai said since 2021, a significant increase had been seen in number and scale of DDoS attacks on DNS infrastructure, with more than 60% of the attacks mitigated by the company in the last three months of 2023 having a DNS component.
“Akamai recognises the security challenges faced by our customers and our partners in a rapidly evolving threat landscape, and we focus on offering robust DDoS protection for all key entry points to their digital infrastructure, whether on-prem, in cloud, or hybrid,” said Sean Lyons, senior vice-president and general manager of Infrastructure Security at Akamai.
{loadposition sam08}“Organisations are looking for a better way to manage the increasing volume of DNS/DDoS attacks they face every year. With the launch of Shield NS53, customers can rest assured their servers will have no downtime, and they can instead focus on business operations.”
The company claimed it handles more than 11 trillion DNS requests each day and finds 2/5 of queries for top 50 financial services customers are illegitimate NXDOMAIN queries, also known as DNS resource exhaustion attacks.
The ways in which Akamai Shield NS53 could help were by:
- Acting as a shield between cyber criminals and critical digital assets to stop illegitimate DNS queries at the edge of Akamai’s network while responding to legitimate queries either from cache or forwarding them to the customer’s original DNS server, thereby improving its security, availability, and performance.
- Proactively building custom DNS security policies, which could be self-configured by customers using the Akamai Control Centre or APIs, with customers having control over dynamic policy configurations and data, and having the ability to enforce their policies.
- Improving the performance and the return-on-investment of existing DNS infrastructure by acting as a bidirectional proxy service, reducing latency and improving user experience. Additionally, Shield NS53 improves and optimises the total cost of ownership and return on investment of customers’ investments in their existing on-prem or hybrid DNS infrastructure.