Akamai says its Prolexic DDoS protection service will double in capacity thanks to new scrubbing-center buildouts. Content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai said Tuesday that its Prolexic DDoS protection service will become able to handle DDoS attacks of up to 20Tbps, thanks to a new wave of construction of so-called scrubbing centers.The company’s announcement said that this will effectively double its current capacity to handle network-level DDoS attacks, with rollouts planned for “all major regions,” which includes US East and West, Canada, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, India, Japan, Hong Kong and the Middle East. The first new centers will come online in the third quarter of this year, and will continue through 2023.Prolexic, which was acquired by Akamai in 2014 for $390 million, represents one prong of the company’s DDoS protection strategy. Prolexic is focused on network-level attacks, which are more “volumetric” and based on large floods of data. By contrast, the company’s Kona site defender product is targeted at application-level threats, which tend to be more “low and slow” in terms of DDoS data volume.“Kona site defender is based on their CDN, so that’s more classic Akamai, since they deliver web content,” said Chris Rodriguez, a research director at market research fimr IDC. Prolexic’s capabilities are based on scrubbing centers, which combine numerous anti-DDoS appliances (usually made by NetScout, Radware or a similar provider) into a dedicated anti-DDoS facility. The appliances there are designed to identify threat traffic in incoming data, and block activity it flags as malicious.“It’s the concept that you’re taking all the third-party DDoS mitigation appliances and putting all the attack traffic there, and returning it [to the client] via a GRE tunnel [or similar secure connection],” Rodriguez said. The new scrubbing centers will be fully software-defined, using cloud-based versions of the DDoS mitigation appliances, according to Akamai. The new capabilities are a response to what the company said is an increasingly sophisticated DDoS attack landscape. Where the top five DDoS attack methods represented 90% of attacks in 2010, that figure is down to 55% in the present day—which means that there are simply more and more sophisticated techniques for DDoS attacks out there.“Since 2020, organizations have experienced a deluge of DDoS extortion, high-profile, multi-terabit attacks, hacktivism, and an explosion of novel threats,” Akamai said in its announcement.Prolexic pricing won’t change as a result of the new capacity, according to the company, which said that it will continue to price that protection on a per-data-center location rate, based on the “expected clean inbound traffic level.” Related content news FBI probes into Pennsylvanian water utility hack by pro-Iran group Federal and state investigations are underway for the recent pro-Iran hack into a Pennsylvania-based water utility targeting Israel-made equipment. By Shweta Sharma Nov 29, 2023 4 mins Cyberattacks Utilities Industry feature 3 ways to fix old, unsafe code that lingers from open-source and legacy programs Code vulnerability is not only a risk of open-source code, with many legacy systems still in use — whether out of necessity or lack of visibility — the truth is that cybersecurity teams will inevitably need to address the problem. By Maria Korolov Nov 29, 2023 9 mins Security Practices Vulnerabilities Security news Amazon’s AWS Control Tower aims to help secure your data’s borders As digital compliance tasks and data sovereignty rules get ever more complicated, Amazon wants automation to help. By Jon Gold Nov 28, 2023 3 mins Regulation Cloud Security news North Korean hackers mix code from proven malware campaigns to avoid detection Threat actors are combining RustBucket loader with KandyKorn payload to effect an evasive and persistent RAT attack. By Shweta Sharma Nov 28, 2023 3 mins Malware Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe