Akamai Technologies, Inc. announced the launch of Akamai Shield NS53, a product that protects on-premises (on-prem) Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure from resource exhaustion attacks. These attacks overwhelm servers to the point that they can no longer respond to valid DNS queries. The new offering complements Akamai Edge DNS, which is a comprehensive cloud-based DNS solution, and Akamai Prolexic, the industry-leading distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection platform for Layer 3 and Layer 4 attacks. 

Over the past three years, there has been a significant increase in the number and the scale of DDoS attacks on DNS infrastructure. In the fourth quarter of 2023, more than 60% of the DDoS attacks mitigated by Akamai had a DNS component, emphasizing why the security, availability, and reliability of critical DNS infrastructure remains a high priority for digital infrastructure security leaders. If the DNS infrastructure of a business or institution goes down, their online presence also goes down, causing reputational damage and financial losses. 

"Akamai recognizes the security challenges faced by our customers and our partners in a rapidly evolving threat landscape, and we focus on offering robust DDoS protection for all key entry points to their digital infrastructure, whether on-prem, in cloud, or hybrid," said Sean Lyons, SVP and GM of Infrastructure Security at Akamai. "Organizations are looking for a better way to manage the increasing volume of DNS/DDoS attacks they face every year. With the launch of Shield NS53, customers can rest assured their servers will have no downtime, and they can instead focus on business operations."

Akamai processes more than 11 trillion DNS requests daily and finds that roughly 40% of DNS queries for the top 50 financial services customers are illegitimate NXDOMAIN queries, also known as DNS resource exhaustion attacks. Security leaders can now rapidly and easily deploy Akamai Shield NS53 to protect their on-prem and hybrid DNS infrastructure from such attacks. This solution helps customers by:

• Acting as a shield between cybercriminals and critical digital assets to stop illegitimate DNS queries at the edge of Akamai's network while responding to legitimate queries either from cache or forwarding them to the customer's original DNS server, thereby improving its security, availability, and performance.
• Proactively building custom DNS security policies, which can be self-configured by customers using the Akamai Control Center or APIs. Customers have complete control over their dynamic policy configurations and data, and can enforce their policies in real time.
• Improving the performance and the ROI of existing DNS infrastructure by acting as a bidirectional proxy service, reducing latency and improving user experience. Additionally, Shield NS53 improves and optimizes the total cost of ownership and the ROI of customers' investments in their existing on-prem or hybrid DNS infrastructure. 
  

Akamai is leveraging its global partner ecosystem and extensive on-premises enterprise infrastructure security expertise to assist customers in onboarding Akamai Shield NS53. The new solution is available immediately from Akamai's strategic partners such as Carahsoft in North America, and from additional authorized partners globally. Organizations can visit the Akamai Partner Directory to find a partner for their region.