A majority of the Internet attack traffic in 2014’s fourth quarter originated in China, followed by the U.S., according to cloud service provider Akamai.

China and the U.S. were the only countries where more than 10% of attack traffic originated, Akamai said in its quarterly state of the Internet report. The other top 10 nations each had less than 5% of the world’s attack traffic. Taiwan, for instance, came in third with 4.4% of the traffic.

Still, the attack traffic coming from China was down compared to the third quarter, falling to 41% from 49%. Attack traffic coming from the U.S. also fell, decreasing to 13% from 17%.

Akamai monitors attacks aimed at its customers, which include Yahoo, IBM, NBC Sports and ESPN.

The number of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks in the quarter was up more than 20% sequentially. Akamai counted 327 attacks compared to 270 attacks in the third quarter. The overall number of DDoS attacks for 2014 was 1,150, almost the same as in 2013, when there were 1,153.

Of the five sectors Akamai monitors, all but one saw an increase in the number of DDoS attacks: the enterprise sector, which saw a decrease in attacks to 100 from 106. The public sector saw the greatest increase in attacks, suffering 38 in the fourth quarter, up from 22 in the previous quarter. The other sectors Akamai monitors are commerce (88 attacks), media and entertainment (51 attacks) and high tech (50 attacks).

Read the Full Article: Source – Computer World
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2902075/akamai-most-internet-attacks-in-q4-originated-in-china.html

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