Security Friday: Yahoo, Akamai, Level 3

The fact that much of the internet is a soft target has been reinforced on an almost weekly basis.

Yesterday it was the internet icon Yahoo, which was hammered by the revelation that data from 500 million accounts was stolen. Among the booty was people’s logins, scrambled passwords, security questions and answers, and, well, that’s more than enough right there. The break-in happened quite some time ago, and Yahoo apparently only learned of it when blocks of the data started to appear on the so-called ‘dark web’. An unnamed state-sponsored actor is being blamed, which is code for China or Russia these days. No word yet on whether the news will have repercussions on the pending purchase of Yahoo by Verizon.

Meanwhile, on the DDoS front Brian Krebs’ security website is getting kicked off of Akamai‘s infrastructure, which had been hosting it for free. Apparently, Krebs blew the whistle on a major DDoS service being offered on the web and got the perpetrators arrested. That was followed, rather predictably, by a DDoS attack, but one so large that Akamai decided that it had had enough of hosting the site pro bono. One can’t help but think that the bad guys won one here, but I’m sure Krebs will be back so it will be temporary.

And on the new products and services front, Level 3 continued to roll out more security capabilities. Yesterday they launched a cloud-based Adaptive Threat Intelligence service, following closely on the enhanced DDoS mitigation capabilities they announced last week. Security is certainly a hot subject, and Level 3 is hoping to turn its upgraded security portfolio into some enterprise growth.

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Categories: Content Distribution · Internet Backbones · Security