According to cloud provider Akamai’s fourth quarter 2013 State of the Internet Report, China was the source of 43% of all global Internet attacks in 4Q 2013. The U.S. was determined to be the source of 19% of attack traffic in the quarter, then Canada with 10%, Indonesia with 5.7% and Taiwan with 3.4%. The report disclosed cyberattacks originating from IP addresses in 188 different countries.
It should be noted that Akamai’s report is based on an analysis of the IP addresses from which the attacks originated, so it’s possible that the actual attacker is using “slave machines” he controls from another country.
DDOS attacks up
The report also pointed out that Distribution Denial of Service attacks increased globally by a startling 23% compared with the third quarter of 2013 and by nearly 75% versus the fourth quarter of 2012. Around half of the total DDOS attacks in the quarter were at targets in North or South America.
Internet speeds increasing
One piece of good news is that the average worldwide Internet connection speed continued to climb. The average global connection speed jumped by an impressive 5.5% in 4Q 2013 to 3.8 megabits per second. The average peak speed rose nearly 30% to 23.2 Mbps.
Highly networked South Korea reported the highest average connection speed at 21.9 Mbps in the fourth quarter of last year, while Hong Kong racked up the highest peak speed at 68 Mbps. India had the lowest average connection speed at 1.5 Mpbs and Indonesia was right behind with an average connection speed of 1.6 Mpbs.
The average connection speed in the U.S. in 4Q 2013, was 10 Mbps and the peak speed topped out at 43.7 Mbps. The highest average connection speed in the EMEA was the Netherlands at 12.4 Mbps, and the highest average peak speed was Switzerland at 44.2 Mbps.
The average Internet connection speeds for mobile devices worldwide ranged from 0.6 Mbps to a high of 8.9 Mbps. Average peak speeds varied from 3.1 Mbps to above 100 Mbps. The lowest average peak speed in the Americas was Peru at 10.5 Mbps.
