DDoS Attacks Grows 50% in 2013: Akamai Report

Distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks rose by 50 percent in 2013 over the previous year, according to a new report from cloud services provider (CSP) Akamai Technologies (AKAM).

In its fourth quarter, 2013, ‘State of the Internet’ Report, which includes data from customers across the Akamai Intelligent Platform, Akamai customers reported 1,153 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2013.

However, Akamai reported that the number of reported DDoS attacks rose 23 percent between the third and fourth quarters. During the fourth quarter of 2013, Akamai identified 188 countries/regions that originated observed attack traffic, which are three more than last quarter.

China maintained its position as the country that originated the most observed attack traffic, with quarter-over-quarter growth from 35% to 43%. It was followed by the United States at 19% (up from 11%) and Canada – which grew by 25 times quarter-over-quarter to 10%.

Besides, it mentioned that the global average connection speed continued to improve, with a quarterly increase of 5.5%, reaching 3.8 Mbps.

The report provides insight into key global statistics such as network connectivity and connection speeds, attack traffic, broadband trends and availability, and IPv6 adoption. It also includes measurements of page load times using Akamai’s real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities, and provides insights on Akamai traffic activity related to Internet disruptions in Syria, Suriname, Guyana, Libya and Cuba.