Description

Your website is no longer read only by people.

Tony Lauro opens this episode with a client whose sequential order numbers let a competitor read their daily volume through a public API. No breach. No alert. Just a number counting up in plain sight.

The same blind spot shows up when a product drop gets sniped by bots in seconds, or when the large language models you're exposing to customers and employees get probed before anyone notices.

Tony has spent 13 years inside Akamai's bot management and API security practice, watching exactly this shift happen. He walks through what replaced the old human-or-machine test, and it comes down to one thing: who decided your defaults, and whether anyone at your company ever checked.

What We Get Into

• (00:00) - How sequential order numbers exposed one company's growth rate to a competitor
• (01:00) - Why "human or bot" is the wrong security question now
• (03:54) - AI agents that act like your customers, and why bot management needs a third tier
• (26:38) - Brand safety versus listing volume: a marketplace's real tradeoff
• (29:03) - Cyber fusion: why security and marketing finally have to talk
• (36:57) - Pushing your security policy to the edge means trusting your provider's judgment call
• (45:01) - The three places AI is actually hitting your business at once
• (50:57) - Prompt injection and what a firewall built for AI actually watches for
• (01:28:57) - Every proof of value finds something. That's not proof it works.
• (02:04:38) - The default is the most important thing you never reviewed

What We Mentioned

• Akamai, bot management and API security
• Akamai's "Firewall for AI," announced at RSA Conference
• Akamai's recent acquisition moving the company into the browser (name unconfirmed, see flag above)
• robots.txt and llm.txt, the standards good bots and crawlers are supposed to honor
• AEO and GEO (answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization)

About the Guest

Tony Lauro, Security Director at Akamai. Thirteen years inside Akamai's bot management and API security practice, working the exact problem this episode covers: telling good traffic from bad without losing customers in the process.

Connect with Tony: Linkedin | Akamai

About Signed

Signed is the podcast for buyers in a market built for sellers. Host Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, sits down with CIOs, CFOs, operators, and founders who've lived inside real enterprise tech deals. New episodes weekly at itbroker.com/podcast. If you're in the middle of a real tech decision and want someone in your corner, book an intro call at itbroker.com. Buy tech without regret. Follow: @itbrokerdotcom

Full Transcript
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