According to Akamai’s State of the Internet report, cyberattacks tripled last year. Akamai is one of the largest distributed networks around the world, it reported that distributed denial of service attacks tripled in 2012 as compared to the previous year. The company’s customers went through 768 DDoS attacks in 2012, majority of the attacks were targeted towards commerce sector while roughly 20% were targeted towards Akamai’s enterprise customers. The company is only counting attacks that require human interaction for mitigation. Attacks that are automatically mitigated without requiring no or little human interaction have not been factored in the report.
41% of fourth quarter attack traffic originated from China, up 8% from the attack traffic of third quarter. China has been criticized much recently for cyberattacks originating from its soil. Only yesterday it was reported that U.S. is now going to take a firm stand against cyberattacks from China, this firm stand could entail visa restrictions for individuals involved in such attacks and even economic sanctions. Akamai’s report doesn’t have an explanation as to why attack traffic from China increased substantially in the final quarter of 2012. Attack traffic that originated from the U.S. decreased to 10% in the fourth quarter, as compared to 13% in the previous quarter.
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