Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
As the world continues to deal with the ramifications of the COVID 19 pandemic, the way people work and communicate has drastically changed in the last year. With many people in the global workforce and education sectors opting to telecommute to mitigate risk from the viral outbreak, global web traffic has seen a heavy surge in usage. Akamai Technologies CEO Tom Leighton says that the rise in global internet traffic has also led to an increase in malicious cyber attacks and nefarious actors.
Akamai Technologies is one of the world's biggest cloud computing and cybersecurity firms, giving credence to Leighton’s claims. Their technology provides the online backbone of some of the largest companies on the planet. With many workers telecommuting into offices, the potential number of targets for cyber attack grows.
“People are working remotely, and are less secure, and lots of enterprises still haven’t totally caught up with security. The threat actors are working very hard,” said Leighton. He says the company has seen a large rise in DDoS attacks, which can disable websites or larger networks with excessive connection requests.
Leighton says that Akamai is making large investments in their cybersecurity to prevent downtime related to DDoS attacks.