Akamai

The Netacea Akamai integration detects bot activity and performs mitigating actions in line with the client blocking strategy.

Netacea Akamai Plugin

The Netacea Akamai integration allows customers that benefit from the power of Akamai's CDN, DDos protection and WAF services, to seamlessly integrate Netacea’s advanced bot management capabilities into their estate.

Netacea utilizes Akamai EdgeWorkers to perform protection actions, along with Akamai DataStream 2 to stream log data for further analysis.

Request Flow

When a visitor first hits a site protected by Netacea/Akamai, the plugin will query the Netacea Protector API service. If the visitor is known to be malicious, the plugin will perform the appropriate mitigation action.

A cookie containing information about the validity of a user is placed on the client’s device for further identification and checked periodically for validity. DataStream 2 will stream log data on the visitor and session to the Netacea Monitor Ingest Service where Netacea’s Detection Engine will perform further analysis to confirm if they are a good actor. This action is done asynchronously so adds no latency to the request. If at any point the visitor’s activity becomes malicious the Netacea Protector API service will be updated and the plugin will perform the appropriate mitigation.

The diagram below and supporting notes explains how traffic flows in this implementation (at a high level).

Akamai Integration Traffic Flow

1. The visitor requests the site protected by Netacea/Akamai.

2. The Netacea Akamai Plugin will query the Netacea Protector API service to check if the visitor is known to be malicious or safe.

3. DataStream 2 passes a copy of the web request as log data for analysis using our collective threat intelligence, machine learning and behavioral analysis to determine if the request is safe.

4. Analysis results are published for the Netacea Akamai Plugin to read and determine what mitigation strategy should be used for this traffic.

5. If the requests are benign, they are passed to the origin as normal.

6. If the requests require a mitigation to take place, the appropriate action is taken and served to the client.