[HIB]Akamai: Funneling Bits, Foiling Hackers

In a Cambridge, Mass. control room packed with screens monitoring the Internet's vital signs, Thomas Leighton is watching colored lines arc across the globe. One bends from Milan to somewhere in Turkey. Another stretches from Riyadh to a city in New Zealand. Each represents an attempt to breach the defenses of one of the 65,000 servers his firm, Akamai Technologies ( AKAM - news - people ), has tucked away in data centers around the globe. Leighton, the 53-year-old chief scientist at Akamai, describes how the screen lights up when a botnet--a colony of thousands of unwitting computers hijacked with malicious software--launches a mass attack from China on a U.S. target: The teeming lines streak across the Atlantic like an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. "We just hope our government customers don't get confused and push the wrong button," he jokes darkly.

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