Akamai Introduces Prolexic Network Cloud Firewall

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, today announced the launch of its Prolexic Network Cloud Firewall. This new capability of Akamai Prolexic allows customers to define and manage their own access control lists (ACLs) while enabling greater flexibility to secure their own network edge.

Prolexic is Akamai’s cloud-based DDoS protection platform that stops attacks before they reach applications, data centers and internet-facing infrastructure.

DDoS threats are on the rise again, a trend that is being accelerated by the growing number of businesses and organizations that rely on online services to operate. An increasing availability of DDoS tools and services on the dark web makes it easier for attackers to launch these types of attacks. The growing number of internet-connected devices and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created a larger attack surface for cybercriminals to exploit. DDoS attacks are now increasingly being used as one of multiple threat vectors in triple extortion attacks, typically in combination with ransomware and data exfiltration.

Increasingly, nation state threat actors, hacktivists, and similar highly organized collectives are currently using DDoS as part of their attack portfolio against a growing number of very diverse targets. In all of these scenarios, DDoS is often used as a distraction to divert attention away from other types of attacks, such as data exfiltration or network infiltration. Victims that have no sufficient DDoS protection in place will typically spend all their resources fencing off that one attack while not having the attention span or bandwidth to fight other threats that were launched in parallel.

Akamai Prolexic provides DDoS protection services to a wide range of organizations, including businesses, governments, and non-profit organizations. With a growing mitigation capacity of currently 20 Tbps, Prolexic can fight off even the largest, most complex threats, like recently record-breaking DDoS attacks in Asia (+900 Gbps) and Europe (+700 Mpps).

The Prolexic network cloud firewall  allows more efficient and flexible defense against DDoS attacks and even expands Prolexic’s  protection capabilities beyond DDoS.

While Prolexic’s overall service and mitigation stacks are not changing, the new offering allows customers to define and adjust their own access control rules and provides analytics of existing ones. Improvements include the ability to define proactive defenses to block malicious traffic instantly, alleviate local infrastructure by moving rules to the edge and to quickly adapt to network changes via a new user interface. 

“The feature most requested by our Prolexic customers is the network cloud firewall,” said Sean Lyons, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Security at Akamai. “We are expanding Prolexic’s leading DDoS protection capabilities and empowering customers to define access control and firewall rules centrally and quickly, for their entire networks advertised through the Prolexic global footprint. This is a powerful tool in emergency situations, not just DDoS attacks, but also in scenarios like zero day vulnerabilities, where access can be shut down in an immediate, yet targeted way. As we enforce rules at the edge of our customers’ networks, they don’t have to worry about getting all internal firewalls configured – which might just take too long.”

Akamai Prolexic stops attacks with a cloud-based DDoS scrubbing platform to protect applications wherever they are deployed, whether in a data center, the public cloud, or a colocation facility. It provides comprehensive protection against the broadest range of DDoS attack types and defends against high-bandwidth sustained attacks, as well as today’s complex multi-vector attacks that jump from application to application. Prolexic includes proactive mitigation controls tailored to network traffic to stop attacks instantly, backed by active mitigation performed by Akamai’s 24/7 global Security Operations Command Center (SOCC), and provides customers a unique 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).