Posts tagged ‘Akamai’

Symantec Platinum

Symantec Platinum support is an outrageous expense. On a recent renewal we found that the software cost $20k and platinum support was around $12k. What do you get for this 50% premium?

  • Tech support agents who actually know something about the product and have reasonable access engineers to actually get problems solved.
  • Reduced wait times on hold.
  • The ability to access the current build of the product.
  • 24/7 support instead of 12/5
  • A special knowledge base.
  • Customized Email, pager, and telephone alerts for virus notification.
  • The brochure says something about special akamai live update servers. I wasn’t aware of that was only for platinum people.
  • Online Support Ticketing

It seems to me that just purchasing the product should entitle you to the best parts of that. Why have a special knowledge base for those with deep pockets. The knowledge base for platinum customers is better than the knowledgebase available to the gold tech support (either that the gold tech support doesn’t know how to use a knowledge base search).
Purchasing the product should entitle you to the latest bug fixes. They shouldn’t be held aside. If its in public release it should be available to gold customers as well as platinum.
Non-Gold customers shouldn’t have to wait on hold for 60 minutes on a routine basis.

Attack on Akamai takes down top Websites

The Washinton Post is reporting that the Tuesday morning outage of sites that use akamai (Google.com, Microsoft.com, liveupdate.symantec.com, etc) was due to a distributed denial of service attack.
Akamai is a content distributer used by high-traffic websites. When you go to a site like liveupdate.symantec.com you are given a site close to your geographic region (and also via DNS round robin). Often large ISPs have their own akamai server to limit the amount of bandwidth used on their Internet pipes. Because of the large number of Akamai servers, it is very difficult to attain a world wide effect. It would take a large number of compromised hosts being used for a denial of service attack. Russ Cooper of TruSecure speculates that this could be an exploit in the Akamai software itself.
At the time of Code Red, many companies were rudely surprised to find their servers being used in a denial of service attack on www.whitehouse.gov. We need to take the steps necessary to make sure that corporate computers are not vulnerable to this type of exploit. And also that this is detected quickly when installed on employee systems.