Amazon Web Services unveils the Iron Dome of cloud security systems

Cybersecurity is paramount in a world that is only becoming more digitized, and one of the biggest cloud hosting players in the game, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has revealed how it keeps its services clean of malicious domains.

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The hosting arm of Amazon took to its blog to detail its industry-leading security system called Mithra, which the company explains uses an internal neural network graph model that assigns a trustworthiness score to a domain. This score enables AWS to aggregate a list of high-quality domains and low-quality domains, which can then be provided to third parties. This system is capable of evaluating up to 200 trillion DNS requests in 24 hours, and detecting 182,000 malicious domains per day.

Very similar to the Iron Dome, which is an Israeli mobile all-weather air defense system designed to shoot down incoming missiles, Mithra's massive neural network is constantly updated with malicious domain names, preventing them from accessing the network. Additionally, Mithra can send its security information to third parties for further evaluation.

On the customer side of the cybersecurity software are the notifications sent to organizations of potential cyber-attacks from malicious domains, along with any recommendations on a response, prevention, etc.

"By assigning a reputation score that ranks every domain name queried within AWS on a daily basis, Mithra's algorithms help AWS rely less on third parties for detecting emerging threats, and instead generate better knowledge, produced more quickly than would be possible if we used a third party.

Mithra is not only able to detect malicious domains with remarkable accuracy and fewer false positives, but this super graph is also capable of predicting malicious domains days, weeks, and sometimes even months before they show up on threat intel feeds from third parties. This world-class capability means that we can see and act on millions of security events and potential threats every day," writes AWS