Akamai Technologies released their Fourth Quarter 2013 State of the Internet Report that found reported DDoS attack traffic grew by 23 percent quarter-over-quarter and 75 percent from fourth quarter of 2012. Other main findings were the average connection speeds in the top ten countries/regions is now at or above the “high broadband” threshold of ten Mbps and that global average peak connection speed experiences 38 percent growth in 2013. Hong Kong topped the list with the highest average peak connection speed of 68 Mbps.
When looking at Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack traffic, the State of the Internet Report included insights into DDoS attacks based on reports from Akamai’s customers. Although the number of DDoS attacks reported by Akamai customers declined from the second quarter (318) to the third quarter of 2013 (281), reported attacks increased 23 percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter (346) of the same year. In total, customers reported 1,153 DDoS attacks in 2013 â a 50 percent increase from 768 in 2012.
Enterprise and commerce continued to be the industries targeted most frequently by the reported DDoS attacks in the fourth quarter, at 159 and 82 attacks, respectively. Together, they account for just under 70 percent of the reported attacks during the quarter, while slightly less than half of the total attacks were reported by customers in the Americas.
In the Third Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report, Akamai started looking at the likelihood of a company experiencing repeat attacks after an initial DDoS attack. In the third quarter, Akamai reported this as a one in four probability. In the fourth quarter of 2013, the chance of a repeated attack increased significantly to just over one in three (35%), meaning that 56 of the 162 organisations that were attacked suffered repeated threats throughout the quarter.
In February, Akamai acquired Prolexic Technologies, Inc., a company that provides cloud-based security solutions for protecting data centers and enterprise IP applications from DDoS attacks. As a result, future State of the Internet Reports will include insights using additional observations from Prolexic’s Quarterly DDoS Attack Report. Note that unless otherwise specified, observations included in the respective reports are based on separate and distinct sets of DDoS attacks.
On IPv6 adoption, the United States and selected European countries continue to lead the world in terms of IPv6 adoption, with Europe again having seven of the top ten leading countries. Japan and Peru are the only countries from their respective regions to make the top ten list. Double-digit percentage growth rates were seen in eight of the top ten countries, with Peru and Germany seeing the largest increases, at 41 percent and 43 percent, respectively. The lowest rate of growth was seen in Romania, which increased by nearly eight percent quarter-over-quarter.
Colleges and universities continue to be early adopters of IPv6, with moderate to large quarterly increases in adoption rates seen across most of the top 10. Iowa State, the University of Vienna Austria and the University of Saskatchewan all saw double-digit quarterly percentage increases.
On global average broadband connection speeds, the report found they continued to improve, with a quarterly increase of 5.5 percent, reaching 3.8 Mbps. Despite this improvement, half of the countries/regions listed among the top ten in global average connection speeds â including the top four countries/regions â actually saw nominal declines quarterâoverâquarter, ranging from a loss of 0.7 percent in the Netherlands to a drop of 6.7 percent in Latvia. Despite a 1.1 percent decline in average connection speed, South Korea held the top spot from quarter to quarter, reporting the highest average connection speed of 21.9 Mbps.
On mobile connectivity, in the fourth quarter of 2013, average connection speeds on surveyed mobile network providers ranged from a high of 8.9 Mbps (Russian mobile provider RU-1) down to a low of 0.6 Mbps (mobile provider ZA-1 in South Africa). The high is down just slightly from the 9.5 Mbps reported in the third quarter of 2013.
To check out more information, see the Akamai Technologies news release at:
www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2014/press-042314.html