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Dennis Birchard

Cybersecurity Leader

Dennis Birchard is a cybersecurity and business development leader with more than 20 years of experience helping large enterprises manage cyber risk. His work focuses on security architecture (cloud and on-prem), Zero Trust enforcement, pre- and post-merger integration where operational complexity, regulatory pressure, and real-world threats collide. Dennis brings a practitioner’s perspective to strategy, translating architectural rigor into controls that hold up during M&A, regulatory scrutiny, and active threat scenarios.

Posts by Dennis Birchard

How Akamai’s ExAR Capabilities Contained a LATAM Supply Chain Attack

October 06, 2026Dennis Birchard and João Dejavite

Learn how Akamai’s ExAR capabilities helped contain a complex supply chain intrusion targeting Linux, OpenShift, and Windows DMZ workloads in Latin America.

Microsegmentation and Zero Trust: Control the Blast Radius by Design

March 24, 2026Dennis Birchard

Read why cyber resilience should focus on controlling the blast radius with Zero Trust and microsegmentation — and learn how to do it.

Move Over, DDoS: It’s the Era of Distributed Denial of Defense (DDoD)

September 16, 2025Dennis Birchard,  Sven Dummer,  and Sandeep Rath

AI-enabled, sophisticated DDoS attacks can take your defenses down even with moderate volume. This is now an era of denial of defense.

DDoS Attack Trends in 2024 Signify That Sophistication Overshadows Size

The most significant change in how threat actors use DDoS attacks since the Mirai botnet happened in 2024. Get all the details.

How Akamai Protects Customers from HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS Attacks

October 16, 2023Dennis Birchard and Sandeep Rath

Learn more about the HTTP/2 protocol, the “Rapid Reset” vulnerability, and how to maintain a strong defense against DDoS attacks.

DDoS Attacks in 2022: Targeting Everything Online, All at Once

March 10, 2023Dennis Birchard

There was a big shift in DDoS targeting in 2022. Perhaps the most significant lesson learned: DDoS attackers are targeting everything, sometimes all at once.

DDoS in Financial Services: What to Know and What to Do

September 08, 2022Dennis Birchard and Mark Schimmelbusch

Akamai explores trends of recent application-layer DDoS attacks across the Financial Services industry