Akamai to open two new DDoS scrubbing centers in India

Cloud cybersecurity company Akamai has announced two new India-based scrubbing centers, as part of its global infrastructure investment strategy.

With plans to deploy the scrubbing centers in Chennai and Mumbai, Akamai aims to provide protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to local and global businesses in India.

A scrubbing center refers to a centralized data cleansing station where traffic is analyzed and malicious traffic, such as DDoS traffic or known vulnerabilities and exploits, is removed.

The launch targets growing threat avenue in India

A recent computer emergency response team (CERT) report revealed a 256% jump in cybersecurity incidents within two years ending 2021, with a total of 1,402,809 reported incidents. The report also noted the attacks will grow in numbers and sophistication in 2023.

“India’s economy has been experiencing significant growth in recent years with the emergence of new startups and established multinational companies alike, but the vibrant business scene also increases the surface for cyberattacks, which means that a local focus is essential,” Sid Pisharoti, regional vice president for Akamai India Operations, said in a press release. “This launch coupled with our growing cybersecurity portfolio and the 2,000+ security professionals operating in India, Akamai demonstrates our recognition of this key global market and our commitment towards safeguarding our customer’s data and solidifying our presence in the Indian market.”

DDoS attacks are a growing global concern as they have recently been used in conjunction with ransomware to form a triple extortion ransomware attack. Also known as the ransomware distributed denial of service (RDDoS) attacks, these add on a third layer of extortion apart from data encryption and exfiltration.

Businesses already experiencing ransomware incidents are additionally threatened with a DDoS attack to extort further. Moreover, DDoS is also a main attack vector used with advanced persistent threats (APTs) carried out by state-sponsored hackers, criminal organizations, or other malicious actors, making it an even bigger concern.

Akamai’s scrubbing centers use Anycast-based routing that enables mitigation of DDoS attacks close to their point of origin, helping companies keep data within their borders.

Anycast routing is a technique used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers, which can help to mitigate the impact of DDoS attacks. When an attacker sends a flood of traffic to a specific IP address, the anycast network will redirect traffic to the closest server or device. This reduces the traffic that any individual server needs to handle, making it easier for the network to absorb and mitigate the attack.

Earlier this year, Akamai also announced Akamai Qualified Computing Partner Program and said it is looking at building half a dozen major compute centers in India.