Broadband speed has seen a growth in Q3 2013, and so have Web attacks, per a report by Akamai.
The report for Q3 2013 titled, "The State of the Internet" is based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform. The report delves into global statistics such as network connectivity, connection speeds, attack traffic and broadband availability and adoption.
The report reveals that China, Indonesia and the U.S. are the most targeted nations when it comes to virtual attacks, accounting for nearly half of all attacks in Q3 2013.
Akamai observed traffic that originated from 185 countries in Q3 2013. Per the observation, China took the top honors, accounting for 35 percent of "attack traffic", followed by Indonesia in second place with 20 percent and the U.S. with 11 percent, which is an increase from 6.9 percent in Q2 2013.
The concentration of attacks, however, decreased in Q3 2013 and the top 10 countries "originating 83 percent of observed attacks, compared to 89 percent in the second quarter."
Additionally, the report also gives insight into the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which is based on reports from Akamai customers. They reported 281 DDoS attacks which is a decrease of 11 percent when compared to Q2 2013. However, when compared to entire 2012 (768 attacks), Akamai observed that there were more attacks in Q3 2013 (807 attacks) alone.
"Although the number of DDoS attacks reported by Akamai customers in the third quarter declined from the previous quarter, we believe that 2013 will ultimately be a significantly more active year for DDoS attacks than 2012," said David Belson, the report's editor. "As of the end of the third quarter, customers had already reported more DDoS attacks than they did in all of 2012."
There has also been an increase in global average speed of Internet connections. According to the report, the world's Internet speed has increased by an average of 10 percent to 3.6 Mbps. Despite this, in Q3 2013, the global peak connection speed saw a decrease of 5.2 percent to 17.9 Mbps.
"In the third quarter of 2013, we observed that long-term growth in average and average peak connection speeds remained strong, as did growth in global broadband and high broadband adoption rates. We believe these trends point to continued improvement in the quality and performance of Internet connectivity in countries around the world," said Belson.
The top 20 list of regions with the fastest Internet connection was dominated by Hong Kong, which took the top honors, followed by South Korea and Japan on number two and number three, respectively. The U.S. did not even make it to the top 10, coming in at number 13. This could be due to the large landmass which makes it difficult to cover the region fully with high-speed fiber.
