In the wake of widely-reported Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks on sites such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa, content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai said that it has the capability to "mitigate DDoS attacks," in a report from CNET News. Of course, the fact that the company has some 80,000 servers spread over 70 countries goes a long way toward making this possible. What I found interesting was a description by Neil Cohen, on how the system works against DDoS. 

Cohen is Akamai's senior director of product marketing, and he told CNET that "We can mitigate DDoS attacks by having a server extremely close to the court rather than try to absorb the attack in one centralized location. As an attack grows in size and distributes out to more bots, we have a server near the compromised machines. As the attack gets bigger, our network scales on demand."  In effect, the way that Akamai deals with a DDoS is the same engine that allows the CDN to help websites to scale.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News

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