Distributed denial-of-service testing company MazeBolt Technologies Ltd. today launched a native deployment of its RADAR validation platform for customers of Akamai Technologies Inc.

Enterprises using Akamai’s DDoS protection can have continuous testing running within hours without taking services offline. The release targets the configuration gaps that open up as a company adds services, application programming interfaces and regions behind its DDoS protection.

Akamai setups are rarely tested independently against each of those changes, according to MazeBolt, and a gap can stay hidden until an attack reaches a login page or a payment flow. Founder and Chief Executive Matthew Andriani said testing “even a few times a year cannot keep pace” now that artificial intelligence projects keep adding new services and APIs.

Akamai’s own State of the Internet report, published in March, found that Layer 7 DDoS attacks rose 104% over two years, and the company blamed part of that growth on attack tools that use AI to make web applications and APIs easier to hit.

RADAR fires simulated attacks at Akamai-protected services from inside the customer’s own environment. The attack library covers known vectors as well as the AI-orchestrated and AI-generated attacks MazeBolt added with its VectorAI module in June. When RADAR first tests a production environment, about 37% of attack vectors get past the protection already in place, based on MazeBolt’s data from initial deployments.

Each run ends in a report with remediation guidance written for the specific protection vendor, and RADAR repeats the test once a fix is in place. “Deployed protection is not proven protection,” said Eyal Rahimi, vice president of engineering at MazeBolt. Customers also need to be able to prove which gaps they have closed, Rahimi said.

Most financial institutions test far less often. In a MazeBolt survey of 300 of their security leaders last year, 86% said they test their DDoS defenses once a year or less. Akamai reported in May that the median duration of Layers 3 and 4 DDoS attacks on the sector has risen 738% since 2024.

John Grady, chief analyst at Omdia, said misconfigurations and out-of-date rules remain the source of many security incidents. “DDoS is no different,” Grady said. “It is a critical area where security teams must ensure protection is current, because successful attacks impact availability and directly affect the bottom line.”

Native Layer 7 support for Akamai environments is available today to all RADAR customers. Cloudflare Inc., F5 Inc. and Radware Ltd. are among the other mitigation vendors whose products RADAR already tests across scrubbing centers, on-premises equipment and cloud services.

Image: MazeBolt