The majority of our traffic is app-based. We are a mobile-focused company. We have a news aggregation platform, and we have a TikTok type of social media platform in India. It is one of the largest platforms. Everything is on mobile applications, so we have a heavy use of APIs. We use Akamai App and API Protector to look at the traffic patterns and identify malicious traffic. There are people who try to inject malicious data and get into our infrastructure, we also use it for that. These are two use cases for which we use Akamai App and API Protector.
With Akamai App and API Protector, we mainly wanted to implement security on the edge rather than bringing it on-premises. We have more than 300 million users. We have quite distributed traffic. We cannot bring all the traffic in and do the slice and dice to identify threat factors. We just want to address it at the edge, which helps us to get clean traffic. That was a major reason. Because it is a publishing and UGC environment, a lot of bot activities are there. They want to get content from our sites and put it somewhere else. They want to make traffic out of it. To identify that, our resources were getting burned, and we just wanted to protect them from that. That was one key reason for implementing Akamai App and API Protector.
By implementing Akamai App and API Protector, we could address these challenges. We were able to filter out quite a lot of bot traffic or the traffic run by scripts. On the WAF side, we have seen a lot of accesses and command line injections happening on the system. We were able to isolate those as well.
With Akamai App and API Protector, we have attack traffic visibility. It does whatever we define as a baseline. Anything that reaches the baseline is called an attack. That is how the system understands an attack. They have ASG that gives automatic recommendations to reduce false positives, but in some use cases, it is still tricky. When we have highly variable traffic, we have to keep improving or altering our configurations according to the traffic pattern that we are anticipating. It is a manual effort that has to be done because only we know when the traffic is going to surge. For example, when there is a cricket match, we know that the traffic is going to surge, so we may need to slightly adjust certain parameters to adapt to that. Otherwise, that traffic will be identified as malicious traffic and get denied.
Akamai App and API Protector is able to do the cleaning of the traffic so that it reaches the origin. Generally, we are prepared for higher capacity because we do not know when an event can occur and there could be a surge in traffic. Akamai App and API Protector has helped us to clean the traffic to reach the original pages, which is necessary.
To protect our apps and APIs from new and emerging threats, their support team consistently reaches out to us. Whenever a new CVE is there, they implement the patches directly into the portal. The good part with Akamai is that we have an option to review a patch, and if we want, we can apply it. Many solutions in the market are already patched at the backend, so there is no question of monitoring whether that patch is required or not, whereas with Akamai, whenever they apply a CVE, I have the option to review whether it is required or not, and because of that CVE, whether I have some issues with my current traffic pattern. There can be a false positive and the traffic might be getting denied. I can then look into that.
