Akamai Technologies Inc. is working to expand its cybersecurity portfolio in a bid to address companies’ growing concerns about hacking.

The newest addition to the lineup is Enterprise Threat Protector, a cloud-based platform aimed at fending off attacks that exploit the Domain Name System at the foundation of the web. As one of the world’s largest provider of DNS services, Akamai is in a unique position to tackle the issue. The credit goes to the fact that its content delivery network handles 15 to 30 percent of worldwide Internet traffic on any given day.

Enterprise Threat Protector, introduced today, draws upon the data that Akamai collects about online activity to identify malicious domains. Since it works at the Domain Name System or DNS layer, the service enables companies to block employee attempts to access a blacklisted site before a connection is established. The result is that hackers are denied an opportunity to load any malicious files onto their machines, at least via a link.

An attacker still has plenty of other ways to target corporate infrastructure, however. Enterprise Threat Protector addresses the risk with a mechanism that can prevent malware already present in a company’s network from calling home. In particular, it’s designed to block malicious transmissions that are encoded into DNS requests to give the appearance of regular links and trick traditional security systems. 

Administrators can monitor what the service does through a web-based management platform. It doubles as a hub for setting custom rules about what websites employees are allowed to access, which provides an added layer of defense.

Enterprise Threat Protector is meant to complement the existing tools that companies employ to defend their infrastructure. To that end, Akamai has built the service to easily integrate with third party breach prevention software and included the ability to export activity logs. The latter feature lets security teams feed information about hacking attempts into their primary threat detection platform for analysis.

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