[1][2] Yehuda cofounded Riverhead Networks in 2000 and was the head of the School of Computer Science in Tel Aviv University in 2014–2016.

[4][5] Afek studied at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, and in 1970 enlisted in the IDF where he served as a fighter in a special elite operations unit (Sayeret Matkal),[6][7] a service that was extended due to the Yom Kippur War.

In 1978-1980 he worked as an IDF civilian engineer, developing the avionics unit and autopilot of the first successful UAV manufactured by the Israeli Air Force.

In 2000 Afek was the lead founder of Riverhead Networks, a company that provided a mitigation system to distributed denial of service attacks.

[9][10] The Riverhead Guard product was deployed to tens of thousands of sites, protecting them from multi Gbps attacks.