“With the introduction of Bot Manager earlier this year, Akamai helped change the way online businesses deal with the bots and other automated agents that visit their sites,” said Stuart Scholly, senior vice president and general manager of web security at Akamai. “The addition of Cyberfend’s technology is intended to give our customers a better way to spot and stop credential abuse on their sites – benefitting both the online business and its users.”
With sophisticated user credential theft, abuse and breaches on the rise and a major threat for online businesses and their customers, successfully detecting attacks can be challenging. Attackers can hide within regular web and mobile user traffic, attack during normal service hours and distribute attacks from commonly used devices associated with millions of IP addresses across multiple geographic regions.
Through the acquisition of the California-based privately funded company, which is “not material to Akamai’s financials”, Akamai plans to extend the capabilities of the Company’s Bot Manager solution by offering online businesses the technology required to effectively distinguish between real customers and attackers, and limit attackers’ ability to avoid detection.
The company believes that Cyberfend’s machine learning-based real-time detection capabilities – which are already in use on some of the world’s most heavily trafficked web properties – will be “instrumental to Bot Manager’s continued differentiation as the solution that can best meet complex customer requirements,” said an Akamai statement.
Cyberfend co-founder Sridhar Machiroutu added: “Adding the scale and reach of Akamai’s platform to Cyberfend’s technology, and complementing Akamai’s Bot Manager solution with Cyberfend’s capabilities, creates an exciting value proposition for customers worldwide.”
