Keynote

Internet Imballance: Have we given the attackers an edge?

John Shaul

Vice President, Web Security

Akamai Technologies

Cambridge, MA, USA

Abstract

Over the past several years, billions of dollars have been invested globally to build out high speed networks for consumers and businesses alike. Today home internet speed of 100 Mbps are common with some areas offering home networking speeds of 1 Gbps. During the same time period, enormous compute capacity has been deployed in data centers at the core of the internet – primarily to deliver new services to all those connected businesses and consumers. What hasn’t occurred is a commensurate investment in core internet capacity. This has led to an enormous imbalance between capacity at the core and capacity in the last mile.

Enter millions of connected but poorly secured IoT devices and a world filled with smartphone users who install apps without much thought as to their origins. This combination of insecure devices and network capacity imbalance opens the doors to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that can cripple the internet. In this session, Josh will discuss the current internet dynamics relating to growth in capacity and compute, as well as the growth in DDoS attacker capabilities that we’ve seen recently. Josh will also describe the investments that Akamai are making across our global platform to help protect the internet and its citizens from the risks of denial of service.