What Is Application Security?

Web applications and APIs are more important to your business than ever — and increasingly difficult to protect from security threats. The complexity of modern applications creates a broader attack surface with more new entry points for hackers. There are tens of thousands of known vulnerabilities in web apps and APIs that attackers can exploit to access databases, exfiltrate sensitive data, or disrupt business by making applications unavailable. And attackers are constantly discovering new security vulnerabilities that arise as apps and APIs are revised and updated.

In the current threat environment, effective application security (AppSec) requires organizations to defend against multi-vector attacks that include vulnerability exploitation, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, automated botnets, volumetric DDoS, and API-based threats in attacks of increasing sophistication.

When deploying application security tools, it is important to look for solutions that offer several critical capabilities.

A scalable platform

Your app security technology must scale to match demands in traffic while delivering continuous application protection without degrading performance. Your platform must also meet the challenge of applications that are geographically dispersed while providing protection for on-premises, private, or public cloud architecture.

Ease of administration

To simplify management, your technology should automatically revise web application and API protection (WAAP) rules with continuous, real-time threat intelligence, eliminating the need for continuous permissions configuration and updates.

Adaptive protection

The best software security solution will go beyond traditional signature-based threat detection, deploying advanced forms of dynamic application security testing and DDoS protection to deliver more reliable outcomes. Advanced application security technology uses machine learning, data mining, and heuristic (framework)-driven detection capabilities to identify rapidly evolving threats.

API visibility, protection, and control

As the use of APIs becomes more pervasive, superior security technology must automatically discover and profile unknown or changing interfaces, while providing real-time alerts, reporting, and dashboards at the API level.

Flexible, automated management

An application security solution with automated workflows can improve operational efficiency and maximize return on investment. Self-tuning security protections that automatically adapt to your unique web traffic will minimize security risks as well as the burden on your IT teams.

Akamai App & API Protector delivers everything your security teams need from a web application and API protection (WAAP) solution. Our technology defends entire web and API estates with powerful protections designed for simplicity and ease of use, with some of the most advanced security automation available today. App & API Protector combines industry-leading core technologies in bot mitigation, web application firewall, API security, and DDoS protection in a single solution that streamlines security management and allows your DevSecOps teams to do more with less.

Features of App & API Protector include:

• Adaptive, self-tuning security. All security triggers — including real attacks and false positives — are automatically analyzed with advanced machine learning, creating policy-specific tuning recommendations that can be accepted with a few clicks.

• Bot visibility and mitigation. App & API Protector monitors and mitigates bot attacks, relying on real-time visibility into bot traffic and an expansive directory of more than 1,750 known bots.

• Advanced API capabilities. Our technology automatically discovers a full range of known, unknown, and changing APIs across your ecosystem, including endpoints, definitions, and traffic profiles. With greater visibility into APIs, you can manage access control and protect against hidden attacks, find errors, uncover changes, and register newly discovered APIs.

• Simplified onboarding. An easy-to-use wizard streamlines and simplifies the onboarding process.

• Integration with DevOps. App & API Protector can be easily integrated with application development platforms to enable rapid onboarding, uniform policy management, centralized enforcement, and improved collaboration between DevOps and security teams.

• Automatic updates. An adaptive security engine is automatically updated with the latest protections based on analysis of more than 300 TB of daily attack data, using machine learning to identify new vectors as well as permutations of existing ones.

• DOS and DDoS protection. App & API Protector instantly drops network-layer DDoS attacks at the edge while application-layer attacks are mitigated within seconds.

• Custom rules. An easy-to-use rule builder allows security teams to create and manage unique scenarios that aren’t protected by standard controls.

Dashboards, alerts, and reporting tools. Application security reporting tools continually monitor and assess the effectiveness of protections, delivering detailed attack telemetry and analysis of security events.

Edge DNS

Akamai Edge DNS is a cloud-based DNS solution that delivers greater security, resilience, and DNS responsiveness. Rather than simply providing access to two or three DNS servers — a common approach — Edge DNS leverages the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform to provide access to thousands of DNS servers in more than 1,000 points of presence worldwide. As a result, enterprises can count on fast DNS service, 24/7 availability, and the resilience to defend against the largest DDoS attacks.

Prolexic

Akamai Prolexic stops DDoS attacks in the cloud by directing all traffic to one of 20+ global high-capacity scrubbing centers. With cloud-delivered mitigation across all ports and protocols, Prolexic effectively blocks DDoS attacks before they become business-impacting events.

Client-side Protection & Compliance

Akamai Client-side Protection & Compliance strengthens the integrity of web pages by detecting and mitigating suspicious script behaviors. Our authentication technology protects websites from JavaScript threats such as web skimming, formjacking, and Magecart attacks by identifying vulnerable resources, pinpointing suspicious behavior, and stopping malicious activity.