Akamai Identifies China As Main Source Of Cyber Attacks

The latest quarterly ‘State of the Internet‘ report from Akamai Technologies has revealed the most recent snapshot of the changing Internet landscape.

The report highlights the growth of connected devices, broadband uptake, and the arrival of the smart home, but also touches upon the vexing issue of cyber security.

UK Improving

It is no surprise then that the report highlighted that global broadband adoption rate has now reached 60 percent, although it did point out that average connection speeds have dropped 2.8 percent.

“One need only look to the sheer number of connected device- and smart home-related announcements that came out of the 2015 International CES to see that consumers are continuing to adopt and expect more from connected technology and services,” said David Belson, editor of the report. “The strong year-over-year growth trends illustrated in this quarter’s report show that the Internet is evolving and expanding to meet the growing demands of our increasingly connected lifestyles.”

Akamai now classifies broadband as speeds of 4Mbps or greater, and high broadband as speeds of 10Mbps or greater. Its figures reveal that the UK is now doing fairly well compared its European rivals as it achieved an average connection speed of 10.7Mbps. France for example achieved an average speed of 6.9Mbps, Germany 8.7Mbps, and Spain 7.8Mbps. The UK is however still lagging behind the likes of Romania 11.3Mbps, Hong Kong 84.6Mbps, Singapore 83Mbps, and Uruguay 58.6Mbps.

But the report just doesn’t look at broadband speeds, it also charts a number of other trends, including security, thanks to Akamai maintaining a distributed set of unadvertised agents deployed across the Internet to log connection attempts that the company classifies as attack traffic.

Attack Vectors

Using this data, Akamai is able to identify the top countries from which attack traffic originates, although it admits that the source IP address may not actually represent the nation in which an attacker resides.

Top of the naughty step for carrying out cyber attacks is China, which had the highest concentration of attacks (50 percent) coming from that country. That is nearly three times more than the US, which saw observed traffic grow by approximately 25 percent quarter-over-quarter.

According to the report, China and the United States were the only two countries to originate more than 10 percent of observed global attack traffic.

Akamai customers meanwhile reported 270 DDoS attacks for the second quarter in a row. Overall, this represents a 4.5 percent reduction in attacks since the beginning of 2014 and a 4 percent decrease in comparison to the third quarter of 2013.

On the mobile connectivity side as well, South Korea continued to claim the top spot for the highest average mobile connection speed, growing from 15.2 Mbps to 18.2 Mbps in the third quarter.

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