October 2019 – What’s New in Security?

by Renny Shen on October 11, 2019

The October 2019 Release includes enhancements to Akamai security products with many new and updated capabilities. Highlights and capabilities that our customers have been particularly excited about include:

The Bot Intelligence Console provides greater visibility into the bot landscape, allowing you to benchmark against your industry vertical or the platform as a whole, and see everything that Akamai knows about any individual bot.
KRS Evaluation Mode makes it easier to keep your WAF protections up to date by comparing the impact of new or updated rules against existing configured protections.
Device Posture adds user context to secure application access by incorporating an array of device and threat intelligence signals into a risk profile for every user.

To learn more about what’s new for your products, continue reading below:

Adaptive Media Delivery

Bot Manager

Enterprise Application Access

Enterprise Threat Protector

Fast DNS

Identity Cloud

Kona Site Defender

Prolexic Routed

Web Application Protector

*Additional Resources

Adaptive Media Delivery

Adaptive Media Delivery introduces additional content security capabilities to protect video media against unauthorized access or piracy.

Key Features*
Access revocation	Provides a customer the ability to revoke an active video streaming session in real-time if it is determined to be either unauthorized or the source of piracy. Sponsorships Available Sponsorships Available Sponsorships Available
Watermarking	Server-side watermarking support pre-integrated with leading 3rd party providers to provide a more effective way to trace piracy back to the source.

Bot Manager

With the October Release, Bot Manager provides new bot intelligence with unmatched visibility into the bot landscape, allowing you to both benchmark your bot traffic against your industry vertical and better understand the behavior and characteristics of bots coming to your site. The release also includes continued improvements to various bot detections, scheduled reports, integrated reporting for multiple security configurations, Fast Activation for new properties, and a Site Shield API.

Key Features*
Bot Intelligence Console	New Security Center report provides visibility into your bot traffic compared to your industry vertical or across the Akamai platform, as well as the ability to lookup and obtain specific intelligence on individual bots.
Mobile protection improvements – detection accuracy	Increases granularity of data collected from mobile device sensors to improve bot detection accuracy when protecting endpoints supporting native mobile apps.
Akamai-categorized bots – category exceptions	Adds flexibility to better manage “good bots” sending requests to endpoints protected by Bot Manager Premier. Customers can create exceptions for customer- or Akamai-categorized bots to bypass behavioral anomaly analysis detections.

Enterprise Application Access

Enterprise Application Access profiles end user devices to provide additional context and granularity when validating access to enterprise applications.

Key Features*
Device Posture	Provides a user risk assessment using device vulnerability signals such as OS version, patches, and device firewall status, as well as threat intelligence signals including device compromise status from ETP and 3rd-party endpoint detection policies.

Enterprise Threat Protector

Enterprise Threat Protector expands protection against phishing attacks with a new zero-day phishing detection engine.

Key Features*
Zero-day phishing	Adds a zero-day phishing detection engine to analyze requested web pages and compare to known phishing page fingerprints, to protect against phishing attempts in real-time – even when the phishing page has never been seen before.

Fast DNS

Fast DNS increases the number of supported DNS zones for customers with a large number of web domains, and has added UI improvements to enhance usability. In addition, Fast DNS logs are now watermarked to be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations designed to prevent billing errors or inconsistencies.

Key Features*
Additional zone support	Support for additional one million zones

Identity Cloud

Identity Cloud adds a new region for Canadian customers that have data residency requirements for storing personally identifiable information (PII).

Key Features*
Canada region	Supports data residency requirements for Canadian customers by allowing consumer identity data to be locally stored within Canada.

Kona Site Defender

Kona Site Defender introduces a number of features designed to reduce complexity and make security easier to manage from the edge. The October release brings updated protections with two new KRS rule updates, while KRS Evaluation Mode makes it easier to deploy new WAF rules and keep up with both changing applications and the latest threats. The release also includes a new 5-step security configuration wizard, scheduled reports, integrated reporting for multiple security configurations, Fast Activation for new properties, and a Site Shield API.

Key Features*
KRS Evaluation Mode	Evaluate new and updated WAF rules (KRS) alongside active configured protections and without impact to protected traffic in order to understand improvements in rule accuracy and efficacy before pushing to deny.
Response action – custom deny	Allows you to create a custom page or API deny response for identified web attacks. This provides the ability to maintain a positive and branded user experience for false positives or to misdirect attackers.
Site Shield API	Allows you to programmatically manage origin cloaking for websites and APIs delivered by Akamai with a configuration API to list, get, and acknowledge Site Shield maps.

Prolexic Routed

Prolexic Routed continues to expand Akamai’s DDoS scrubbing service platform in APJ, with new and upgraded scrubbing centers in Melbourne and Sydney. In addition, Prolexic Routed introduces a new facilitated route-on capability that provide customers with a better approach to hybrid DDoS using Akamai SOCC staff already trusted to mitigate the attack.

Key Features*
Facilitated route-on	Enables Akamai SOCC staff to redirect network traffic through Prolexic scrubbing centers without requiring customer intervention and reducing the overall time required to mitigate an attack. For on-demand Prolexic customers only.
Melbourne scrubbing center	New Prolexic scrubbing center in Melbourne increases in-region DDoS mitigation capacity, improves network resiliency, and reduces latency for Australian customers when routed on.
Sydney scrubbing center	Updates existing Prolexic scrubbing center in Sydney with new features and tooling to support increased capacity CIR plans, add IPv6 support, and increase carrier diversification within the ANZ region.

Web Application Protector

Akamai continues to add new capabilities to Web Application Protector to help you manage your security configuration, while preserving the vision of “click to protect” security. This includes more granular security controls as well as the ability to save, manage, and revert back to previous security configurations. The release also introduces scheduled reports, integrated reporting for multiple security configurations, and Fast Activation for new properties.

Key Features*
Security protection improvements	Adds 1) exclusions to IP and geo network lists, 2) enhanced exception criteria for attack groups 3) alert mode for the penalty box, and 4) different response actions within a single rate policy for IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
Security configuration management	Activate and test security configuration changes on the Akamai staging network before deploying to production. View detailed activation and version history, and easily roll back to previous configuration versions.

*Additional Resources

The October 2019 Release introduces a large number of new and updated features across every Akamai security product. For the full list of updates or to request a walkthrough of updates with your products, please contact your account team or click on the “Get In Touch” button to the right.