Case Study: Tokyo Medical and Dental University significantly reduces internal and external security alerts and blocks targeted phishing with Akamai Technologies' Enterprise Threat Protector

Tokyo Medical and Dental University Improves its Security Posture with Akamai Enterprise Threat Protector

Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), a public university in Tokyo supporting more than 6,000 users across multiple campuses, upgraded its network in 2017 and relied on unified threat management appliances (firewall, URL and email filtering). Despite that, staff began receiving large volumes of targeted phishing emails and dynamic malicious URLs that evaded firewall protections, generating hundreds of internal and external security alerts and overwhelming the IT Development Section.

TMDU ran a proof of concept of Akamai Enterprise Threat Protector (ETP), which inspects recursive DNS queries and blocks threats at the DNS level, then deployed it broadly. ETP immediately flagged thousands of malicious requests daily, allowed the university to block threats before they hit the firewall, and cut firewall alerts to just a few per month; external warnings about malicious outbound traffic stopped entirely. The transition was seamless, cost‑effective through an academic license, and materially improved TMDU’s security posture.

Tokyo Medical and Dental University

Masanori Nasu

Technical Specialist