Akamai enhances its Kona Site Defender Platform

Organizations face great risk from increasingly frequent and continually evolving attempts to render web properties unavailable or steal intellectual property and personally identifiable information. Keeping this in mind, Akamai Technologies has announced that several improvements to its Kona Site Defender web security solutions have been shown to result in dramatic improvements to WAF accuracy. 

As part of an initiative to provide its customers with WAF technology designed to be as accurate as possible, Akamai has developed a custom-built, closed loop test framework for processing a vast amount of attack traffic data collected from the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Further, Kona Site Defender’s WAF now includes protections designed to detect and block some of the newer, popular attack methods that other WAFs do not detect without extensive tuning, such as PHP Injections and Remote File Inclusions.

Ory Segal, Principal Security Architect and Threat Research Team Manager, Akamai, said, “Our goal was to advance the state-of-the-art in WAF accuracy testing frameworks used to create and tune WAF rules and ensure that ours could take advantage of both the sheer amount of data and the intelligence afforded by Akamai’s global computing platform. Through our efforts to develop Akamai’s new advanced testing framework and combine it with our industry-leading data, we believe Akamai is the only company able to offer a WAF solution that takes advantage of data-driven continuous improvement to optimize accuracy and maximize threat coverage.”

The Kona WAF is designed to scale instantly to preserve performance and filter attack traffic close to the source of the attack, protecting customer infrastructure and keeping web applications up and running.