Akamai has launched App & API Protector, a new solution for protecting APIs and web applications.
Last month, Akamai released its ‘API: The Attack Surface That Connects Us All‘ report which highlights the challenges that organisations face in the modern threat landscape. The expert analysts at Gartner even report that APIs will be the most frequent online attack vendor by 2022.
App & API Protector aims to counter such threats with a solution that detects up to two times more attacks compared to traditional rulesets, all while reducing false positives by up to five times.
Akamai claims to have achieved this feat through implementing machine learning and data mining techniques to analyse over 303TB of daily attack data. Automatic updates are then issued to protect against the latest threats.
Amol Mathur, Vice President of Product Management at Akamai, said:
“As the online threat landscape continues to evolve, the need for a holistic, adaptive approach to web application and API security is clear. With the introduction of our new App & API Protector, Akamai customers now have a single, holistic solution that makes sophisticated protection extremely simple.
This builds on Akamai’s proven security technologies, introducing new levels of sophisticated, automated intelligence to keep our customers a step ahead of the cybercriminals.”
The company boasts of six key benefits to using App & API Protector:
- Automatic API discovery and security—The solution automatically discovers unknown and evolving APIs.
- Adaptive and more accurate detections—A multidimensional threat scoring model combines Akamai’s platform intelligence with data/metadata from each web and API request. When actioned with decision-making logic, attacks can be stopped with surgical-grade precision.
- Continuous self-tuning—Security triggers, whether by true or misidentified attacks, are automatically and continuously analysed with machine learning to deliver highly accurate policy-by-policy tuning recommendations.
- Built-in bot mitigation—Akamai’s expansive directory of 1,500+ known bots provides customers with the ability to create and define bots to proactively monitor analytics and prevent attacks.
- Automatic updates—Advanced machine learning and data mining techniques are used by Akamai’s security researchers to automatically update protections based on the continuous analysis of over 303TB of daily attack data.
- DevOps integration made simple—The new protection capabilities can be implemented using the Akamai CLI, Terraform, or scripts in the CI/CD automation pipeline. This enables the rapid onboarding of applications, ensures uniform security policy management across large application and API portfolios, and centralises security enforcement across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
Gartner ranked Akamai the highest for “Ability to execute” in its Magic Quadrant for Web Application and API Protection.
Akamai also received the highest scores for three of the four use cases in the 2021 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud Web Application and API Protection report: API Security and DevOps, High Security, and Web-Scale Business Application.
“The capabilities needed to secure web applications and APIs in today’s global business world amid evolving attacks – ranging from web app business logic attacks to API abuse to DDoS – require integrated solutions that scale,” commented Mathur.
“Akamai’s unique ability to deliver holistic and powerful protections at the edge is the reason why we believe Akamai is given the highest scores in three of the four critical use cases.”
(Photo by FLY:D)
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