Report from the Field: A CDN's Role in Repelling Attacks against Banking Industry Web Sites

This talk describes several types of attacks aimed at content delivery networks (CDNs) and their customers, along with strategies for mitigating these attacks. The attacks range from simple but large-scale denial-of-service attacks, to efforts to deface web sites, to click fraud. The talk presents examples of real attack campaigns, and analyzes the effectiveness of the CDN operated by Akamai Technologies in protecting its customers from them.

Bruce Maggs received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. His advisor was Charles Leiserson. After spending one year as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, he worked as a Research Scientist at NEC Research Institute in Princeton from 1990 to 1993. In 1994, he moved to Carnegie Mellon, where he stayed until joining Duke University in 2009 as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. While on a two-year leave-of-absence from Carnegie Mellon, Maggs helped to launch Akamai Technologies, serving as its first Vice President for Research and Development. He retains a part-time role at Akamai as Vice President for Research.