14 DAY TRIAL // Akamai has released its State of the Internet Report for the first quarter of 2013. It turns out that of the 177 countries monitored by the company, the most attack traffic came from China (34%).
This means China maintains its position as a leader, despite a considerable drop in the volume of attack traffic recorded in the previous quarter.
More interesting is the fact that the second position is occupied by Indonesia, which accounted for 21% of the observed traffic. Indonesia has overtaken the United States, which held the second position in the previous quarter.
The US dropped to the third position with 8.3% of all the attack traffic observed by Akamai in the first part of 2013.
As far as distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks are concerned, the IT security firm’s customers reported 208 attacks. This represents a slight increase from the 200 attacks reported in the last quarter of 2012.
Most of the DDOS attacks were aimed at enterprise customers (35%), followed by the commerce sector (32%), the media sector (22%) and high-tech companies (7%).
The latest State of the Internet Report also highlights the fact that cybercriminals are relying more and more on automated tools called “account checkers” that allow them to determine if the credentials they’ve stolen from other websites can be used to access accounts on e-commerce platforms.
“This quarter's State of the Internet Report shows continued positive growth in terms of Internet and broadband adoption worldwide. We have seen overall increases in average and peak connection speeds along with greater broadband penetration on both a quarterly and annual basis,” comments David Belson, the report's editor.
“However, the levels of malicious activity we've observed show no signs of abating, as evidenced by the ongoing rise in DDoS attacks. This reinforces the continued need for vigilance by organizations that are conducting business and maintaining a presence on the Internet.”
Akamai has also launched an interesting online visualization that presents a snapshot of the Akamai Intelligence Platform activity. The visualization, dubbed “Akamai in 60 Seconds,” is available on the company’s website, here.
The complete First Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report is available for download here.