Indonesia And China Account For More Than Half Of Attack Traffic: Akamai
The top 10 countries/regions generated 89 percent of observed attacks, up from 82 percent in the previous quarter of 2013 the latest Akamai State of the Internet Report has found. The report for the second quarter found that like the first quarter, Indonesia and China again originated more than half of the total observed attack traffic.
In the second quarter, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 175 unique countries/regions, two fewer than was observed in the first quarter of 2013. Indonesia pushed China out of the top spot this quarter, nearly doubling its first-quarter traffic from 21 percent to 38 percent, while China moved to second at 33 percent (down from 34 percent). The United States remained in third even after dropping to 6.9 percent in the second quarter from 8.3 percent in the first quarter.
The number of DDoS attacks reported by customers in Asia nearly tripled in the second quarter, while customers in the Americas accounted for nearly two-thirds of all attacks reported to Akamai. The number of attacks targeting customers in the Enterprise sector nearly doubled in the second quarter, with attacks largely concentrated on customers in the Business Services and Financial Services verticals. However, Web sites and applications in all sectors, across all geographic regions, are potential attack target.
Also, a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) claimed responsibility for several attacks against news and media companies during the second quarter of 2013. The attacks all employed similar spear-phishing tactics in which internal email accounts were compromised and leveraged to collect credentials to gain access to targets’ Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and other sensitive information.
The growth of internet users around the world continues to grow as well. More than 752 million unique IPv4 addresses from 242 unique countries/regions connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform, a two percent quarter-over-quarter increase and 13 percent more than the second quarter of 2012, according to the report. Since a single IP address can represent multiple individuals in some cases – such as when users access the Web through a firewall or proxy server – Akamai estimates the total number of unique Web users connecting to its platform during the quarter to be well over one billion.
Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is of growing importance due to the decreasing availability of IPv4 addresses. The report found peak daily IPv6 request volume on the Akamai Intelligent Platform grew by nearly 40 percent in the second quarter as an increasing number of both mobile and fixed users around the world gained native IPv6 connectivity.
“The Second Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report notes some significant milestones and trends, including the fact that half of all connections to Akamai occurred at speeds of four Mbps or higher, a 25 percent increase since the first quarter of 2012,” said David Belson, the report’s editor. “We also saw a decline in the number of countries/regions with average connection speeds of one Mbps or less – down to 11 from 14 in the last quarter – likely indicative of improved broadband connectivity across some of the slowest geographies. These positive trends bode well for the continued increase and adoption of broadband connectivity around the world.”
To learn more and to access the Akamai archive of past reports, see www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet. To download the figures from the Second Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report, please visit: http://wwwns.akamai.com/soti/soti_q213_figures.zip.
