
Learning Glossary
Informational articles and guides to help you learn more about technology topics in cybersecurity, cloud computing, and content delivery.
For education and training specific to Akamai products and solutions, please visit our Learning Hub.
Security
SECURITY
Learn about cybersecurity
Cybersecurity techniques help to protect networks, devices, and data from unauthorized access or criminal use.
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What Is SASE (Secure Access Service Edge)? -
What Is Malware? -
What Is Enterprise Application Software? -
What Is Cybersecurity? -
What Is Threat Protection? -
What Is Network Security? -
What Is Cyber Resilience? -
What Is Web Security? -
What Is OWASP? -
What Is Cybercrime? -
What Is Cyberthreat Security? -
What Is Threat Intelligence? -
What Is Threat Detection? -
What Is Network Server Security? -
What Is a Black Hat Hacker? -
What Is IT Security? -
What is Ransomware? -
What Are Cybersecurity Solutions? -
Akamai Security Intelligence Group -
What Is a Grey Hat Hacker? -
What Is a White Hat Hacker? -
What Is a Man-in-the-Middle Attack?
SECURITY
Learn about DDoS attacks
A DDoS attack is an attempt to overwhelm a website or online service with traffic from multiple sources to render it unavailable to users.
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What Is a TCP Reset Flood DDoS Attack? -
What Is an Application-Layer DDoS Attack? -
What Are SYN Flood DDoS Attacks? -
What Is a DDoS Attack? -
What Is an SSDP DDoS Attack? -
What Are Pseudo-Random Subdomain Attacks? -
What Is a Ping Flood Attack? -
What Is an HTTP Flood DDoS Attack? -
What Is a GET Flood DDoS Attack? -
What Is DoS Protection? -
What Is a Slowloris DDoS Attack? -
What Are Domain Generation Algorithms? -
What Is a WS-Discovery Flood? -
What Is an SSL/TLS Exhaustion Attack? -
What Are Network Layers? -
What Is a QUIC Flood DDoS Attack? -
What Is a Volumetric Attack? -
What Is a DDoS Booter? -
What Is Blackhole Routing? -
What Is a Low and Slow Attack? -
What Is a Layer 3 DDoS Attack? -
What Is a Website Stresser? -
What Is an NTP Amplification Attack? -
What Is an ICMP Flood DDoS Attack? -
What Is a UDP Flood DDoS Attack? -
What Is NXDOMAIN DDoS? -
What Is a CLDAP Reflection DDoS Attack?
SECURITY
Learn about microsegmentation
Microsegmentation is an emerging security best practice that offers several advantages over more established approaches like network segmentation and application segmentation.
SECURITY
Learn about Zero Trust
A Zero Trust security model is based on a philosophy that no person or device inside or outside of an organization's network should be granted access to connect to IT systems or services until authenticated and continuously verified.
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Zero Trust Security Model — What Is Zero Trust? -
Getting Started with Your Zero Trust Strategy -
What Are Zero Trust Networks? -
What Is Account Takeover (ATO)? -
What Is Zero Trust Networking? -
What Is Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)? -
What Is a Data Breach? -
What Is Remote Work Security? -
What Is a Secure Internet Gateway? -
What Is a Secure Web Gateway? -
How Does Network Security Fit into Zero Trust? -
What Is Maze Ransomware? -
What Is Ransomware Protection?
SECURITY
Learn about web app and API protection
Web app and API protection (WAAP) is security technology that can help to protect web and mobile applications from attack. It can be implemented in a number of ways, including API management, firewalls, web application firewalls, and intrusion detection and prevention systems.
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What Is Application Security? -
What Is Magecart? -
What Is Web Skimming? -
What Is WAAP? -
What Is a Web Application Firewall (WAF)? -
What Is Application Protection? -
What Is a WAF in Networking? -
What Is a Web Application Attack? -
What Is a Firewall? -
What Is App Security? -
What Is a Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)?
SECURITY
Learn about API security
API is the abbreviation for application programming interface. Just like you would protect your account passwords, it is equally important to protect API access, so that identifiers like API keys and API calls do not get misused.
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What Are API Security Endpoints? -
What Are API Security Threats? -
What Is API Abuse? -
What Are API Security Risks? -
What Is API Security for Mobile Applications? -
What Is an API Security Provider? -
What Are API Attacks? -
How to Assess Your API Security -
What Is API Threat Hunting? -
What Is API Sprawl? -
What Is an API Security Audit? -
What Are API Security Breaches? -
What Is API Discovery? -
What Is API Security? -
What Is Credit Card Security? -
How Do APIs Work? -
What Is BOLA? -
What Is API Gateway Security? -
What Is API Protection? -
What Is Tokenization? -
What Is BOPLA? -
What Are API Vulnerabilities? -
What Is the API Lifecycle? -
What Is API Load Testing? -
What Is an API Testing Framework? -
What Are API Security Testing Tools? -
What Is an API Gateway? -
What Is OpenAPI Security? -
What Are Microservices? -
What Is a Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT)? -
What Are API Test Tools? -
What Is a Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT)? -
What Is API Authorization? -
What Is an API Security Checklist? -
What Are the OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks? -
What Is REST API Security? -
What Is API Gateway vs. Service Mesh? -
What Is API Testing? -
What Is API Performance Testing? -
What Is Data Classification? -
What Is API Penetration Testing? -
What Is API Performance? -
What Is API Automation Testing? -
What Is Security Testing for APIs? -
What Is Unrestricted Resource Consumption? -
What Is Endpoint Security? -
What Is Software Composition Analysis (SCA)? -
What Is Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows? -
What Is Server-Side Request Forgery? -
What Is Broken Function Level Authorization? -
What Is Horizontal Scaling vs. Vertical Scaling? -
What Is a Security Misconfiguration? -
What Is an API vs. Webhook vs. WebSocket? -
What Is Improper Inventory Management? -
What Is a Security Operations Center (SOC)? -
What Is the Difference Between gRPC and REST APIs? -
What Is Agent-Based API Security? -
What Is an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)? -
What Is an API Key? -
What Is a Shadow API? -
What Is Tight Coupling and Loose Coupling? -
What Is a Smishing Attack? -
What Is JSON-RPC? -
What Is an API Spec? -
What Is API Governance? -
What Is API Management? -
What Is Big Data Analytics? -
What Is API Versioning? -
What Is API Posture Management? -
What Is an API Call? -
What Is API Compliance? -
What Is API Authentication?
SECURITY
Learn about bots and botnets
Bots are software programs that carry out automated tasks. Botnets are networks of computers infected with bot software that can be controlled remotely by an attacker.
SECURITY
Learn about compliance frameworks
Compliance and regulatory frameworks are sets of documented guidelines and best practices. Organizations follow these guidelines to meet regulatory requirements, improve processes, strengthen security, and achieve other business objectives (such as becoming a public company, or selling cloud solutions to government agencies).
SECURITY
Learn about DNS
DNS, or the Domain Name System, translates human-readable domain names (for example, www.apple.com) to machine-readable IP addresses (for example, 17.253.207.54).
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What Is DNS Traffic Management? -
What Is Domain Management? -
What Is Protective DNS? -
What Are DNS Attack Vectors? -
What Is DNS Cache Poisoning? -
What Are Lame Delegations? -
What Is DNS Data Exfiltration? -
What Is DNS Tunneling? -
What Is Dynamic DNS (DDNS)? -
What Is Cloud Load Balancing? -
What Is DNS? -
What Are Domain Generation Algorithms? -
What Is DNS Security? -
What Is Global Server Load Balancing? -
What Is Authoritative DNS? -
What Is a DNS Proxy? -
What Is a DNS Firewall? -
What Is DNS Rebinding? -
What Is Recursive DNS? -
What Is DNS Caching? -
What Is Reverse DNS? -
What Are DNS Servers?
SECURITY
Learn about multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentication is an authentication method in which a user is granted access only after successfully presenting two or more pieces of evidence (or factors) to an authentication mechanism.
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What Is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Security? -
What Is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)? -
What Are Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Services? -
What Are Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Solutions? -
What Is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)? -
What Is Cloud Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)? -
What Are Passkeys? -
What Is a FIDO Passkey?
SECURITY
Learn about cyberattacks
Cyberattacks are attempts to gain unauthorized access to computer systems, steal data, or disrupt services.
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What Is a Zero-Day Attack? -
What Is Magecart? -
What Is Account Takeover (ATO)? -
What Is Phishing? -
What Is Credential Stuffing? -
What is an Attack Vector? -
What Is REvil? -
What Are Carding Attacks? -
What Is Spear Phishing? -
What Is Ransomware Removal? -
What Is WannaCry Ransomware? -
What Is Royal Ransomware? -
What Is Ryuk Ransomware? -
What Is BlackCat Ransomware? -
What Are the Types of Ransomware? -
What is LockBit Ransomware? -
What Is Petya Ransomware? -
What Is DarkSide Ransomware? -
What Is Ransomware Protection? -
What is Conti Ransomware? -
What Is a Brute-Force Attack? -
What Is Penetration Testing (Pen Testing)? -
What Is a Backdoor Attack? -
What Is a Cyber Attack or Cyberattack? -
What Is SMS Pumping? -
What Is an Attack Surface? -
What Is a Teardrop Attack? -
What is an On-path Attacker?
Cloud Computing
CLOUD COMPUTING
Learn about cloud computing
Cloud computing services are changing how businesses and public institutions use information technology.
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Cloud Portability -
How Does Cloud Computing Work? -
Understanding Cloud Cost Optimization -
Understanding Cloud Ingress and Egress -
What Are Cloud Computing Models? -
What Are Cloud Databases? -
What Are Cloud Environment Types? -
What Are Cloud Native Applications? -
What Are Cloud Resources? -
What Are Compute Instances? -
What Are Databases? -
What Are Message Queues in Event-Driven Architecture? -
What Are Web Servers? -
What Is a Cloud CDN? -
What Is a Cloud Platform? -
What Is a Container? -
What Is a Distributed Cloud? -
What Is AI on Edge Networks? -
What Is AI Technology? -
What Is a Large Language Model?
CLOUD COMPUTING
Learn about cloud computing
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Cloud Portability -
How Does Cloud Computing Work? -
Understanding Cloud Cost Optimization -
Understanding Cloud Ingress and Egress -
What Are Cloud Computing Models? -
What Are Cloud Databases? -
What Are Cloud Environment Types? -
What Are Cloud Native Applications? -
What Are Cloud Resources? -
What Are Compute Instances? -
What Are Databases? -
What Are Message Queues in Event-Driven Architecture? -
What Are Web Servers? -
What Is a Cloud CDN? -
What Is a Cloud Platform? -
What Is a Container? -
What Is a Distributed Cloud? -
What Is AI on Edge Networks? -
What Is AI Technology? -
What Is a Large Language Model? -
What Is an Edge Network -
What Is an Edge Server? -
What Is an Event Consumer? -
What Is an Event Subscriber? -
What Is a Serverless Framework? -
What Is a Service Mesh? -
What Is Autoscaling? -
What Is Big Data? -
What Is CI/CD? -
What Is Cloud-Based Security? -
What Is Cloud Computing? -
What Is Cloud Computing Security? -
What Is Cloud Edge Computing? -
What Is Cloud Infrastructure? -
What Is Cloud Infrastructure Segmentation? -
What Is Cloud Migration and the Migration Process? -
What Is Cloud Native?
AI
Learn about artificial intelligence
These topics cover essential AI vocabulary, definitions, and terminology to help you understand key concepts in artificial intelligence.
Content Delivery – CDN
CONTENT DELIVERY – CDN
Learn about CDNs
Content delivery networks, or CDNs, make online experiences faster and more reliable by delivering content closer to users.
CONTENT DELIVERY – CDN
Learn about streaming and media delivery
Demand for streaming media services and media delivery is growing quickly, presenting content providers with new revenue opportunities and new technical challenges as well.
Learn how the internet works
In a series of short video presentations, Robert Blumofe, Akamai Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, explains how the foundation stones of the World Wide Web work. Other related articles of interest are listed here as well.
Learn about website monitoring
Website monitoring helps proactively track website health and availability for better uptime, higher performance, and an excellent user experience.