What Is a Cyber Attack or Cyberattack?

The evolution of cyberattacks

The nature of cyberattacks is constantly evolving. As businesses move more applications and IT assets onto internet-facing networks, attackers have shifted their strategies and developed attacks that no longer rely purely on brute force to breach a system or take critical infrastructure offline. Cyberattacks today often probe for and take advantage of application vulnerabilities. They may use phishing and social engineering campaigns to lure employees into revealing credentials, sharing sensitive data, or transferring funds to fraudulent accounts. And increasingly, attackers are combining attack methods to launch ever more sophisticated — and successful — cyberattacks.

As a result, savvy organizations are seeking a cybersecurity partner with comprehensive solutions that can ensure a unified defense against an ever-changing universe of threats. That’s why more companies are turning to security solutions from Akamai.

A growing variety of cyberattacks

The many types of cyberattacks today represent increasingly diverse attack vectors, making cybercrime more difficult to defend against, even with the help of law enforcement.

DDoS attacks, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, are malicious campaigns designed to shut down a website or make network resources unavailable to legitimate traffic and users. Attackers accomplish this by flooding sites or servers with so much malicious traffic that they crash or are unable to operate.

Ransomware attacks block access to a company’s files by encrypting everything on a device or server. Attackers demand a ransom in exchange for the decryption key that will reestablish access to critical assets.

Malware is malicious software that, once downloaded to devices or computer systems, can propagate malicious code (such as spyware, as an example), and spread through a network on its own to serve a variety of malicious purposes.

Web application attacks include vectors like cross-site scripting (XSS), zero-day attacks, SQL injection, and other attacks that seek to take advantage of misconfiguration, design flaws, improper coding, and other vulnerabilities in applications.

API attacks use broken access controls, unencrypted communications, machine-in-the-middle attacks, and other methods to illegitimately access information systems and networks via APIs.

DNS attacks target the availability or stability of the Domain Name System (DNS) for a network.

Account takeover is a cyberattack where hackers take ownership of online accounts using stolen credentials.

Botnets are networks of infected devices that are controlled by a central threat actor or group. Botnets are often part of a distributed denial-of-service attack.

Phishing attacks and spear-phishing campaigns use deception and social engineering to trick victims into disclosing information that an attacker can use to steal personal data, money, and credentials.

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are stealthy cyberattacks that allow malicious actors to gain access to networks and remain active for extended periods of time, gathering and extracting valuable data.

Prevent cyberattacks with Akamai

Akamai Connected Cloud offers comprehensive security solutions that protect your entire ecosystem: clouds, apps, APIs, and users. Providing defenses against a wide range of multi-vector cyberattacks, Akamai offers unified technology that delivers in-depth defense against cyberthreats, along with streamlined controls and automated solutions that minimize the workload of IT teams.

Achieve intelligent, end-to-end protection for apps and APIs

Akamai API and application security solutions provide adaptive protections that effortlessly push the latest defenses for apps and APIs. Advanced API discovery helps to manage risk from new and previously unknown APIs while monitoring for malicious payloads. Akamai also offers solutions that defend sites from client-side threats and ensure 100% DNS availability.

Enforce Zero Trust access to apps and the internet from anywhere

Akamai’s phish-proof MFA solution software-based segmentation prevents employee account takeovers and data breaches. Zero Trust Network Access ensures that the right users have precise access to the right apps, rather than to the entire network. Akamai’s secure web gateway safely connects users and devices to the internet. Akamai’s protection for client-side threats spots and blocks malicious activity with real-time visibility into threats and vulnerabilities within all your scripts.

Visualize and segment assets faster

Akamai’s software-based segmentation technology simplifies the process of protecting critical assets wherever they are deployed — in the cloud, virtual servers, on-premises, bare metal, or containers. A flexible allowlist/denylist model facilitates fast risk reduction with few rules. And the ability to consistently enforce policies on a segmented network means the same level of granular, process-level rules can be applied across different operating environments such as Windows and Linux.

Stop the biggest, bandwidth-busting DDoS attacks

Akamai delivers comprehensive protection against the broadest range of DDoS attack types. Purpose-built to stop attacks in the cloud before they reach applications, data centers, and other internet-facing infrastructure — Akamai’s DDoS protection relies on 20+ global high-capacity scrubbing centers where the Akamai Security Operations Command Center (SOCC) deploys proactive and/or custom mitigation controls to stop attacks instantly.

Stop credential stuffing, bots, and human web fraud

Akamai security solutions spot suspicious human and bot behavior in real time to prevent account takeover and thwart cyberattacks driven by human extortion and fraud. Our bot mitigation solutions let the good bots in, while defending against dangerous, costly bot attacks. Our customer identity and access management solution provides fast-to-deploy single sign-on (SSO), registration, and authentication.

Benefits of Akamai security solutions

Stronger security

Akamai edge security solutions stop attacks in the cloud, at the network edge, closer to attackers and before they can impact applications and infrastructure.

Greater scale

With Akamai’s unmatched scale and global distribution, you can stop the largest direct attacks and protect your organization from collateral damage during cyberwarfare against other companies.

Real-time support

We provide a single point of contact for attack support and real-time incident response. After an attack, our solutions allow you to go beyond high-level dashboards to gain granular visibility for root-cause analysis and post-attack forensics.

Improved visibility

Manage multiple solutions through our web-based portal for greater visibility into attacks and policy control. Integrate your existing security information and event management (SIEM) tool for greater control over all security solutions.

Integrated solutions

Akamai security solutions are designed to work together to improve mitigation and simplify management.

Simpler management

Akamai Managed Security Service lets your security teams offload the task of deploying physical appliances and software solutions to our team of experts. Adaptive threat protections help to address changing threat conditions.

Reduce future risk

Akamai enables you to build a security infrastructure that will respond to threats today as well as tomorrow. Akamai Connected Cloud allows you to seamlessly deploy new security capabilities and solutions as they become available, without disrupting applications and infrastructure.