US and China lead net attacks

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 30 May 2008 at 08:10

The US and China are responsible for three out of ten internet attacks, according to a new study.

The Akami State of the Internet report observed attacks from 125 different countries, but found that traffic emanating from the US and China was responsible for 30% of all attacks.

The top 10 countries were responsible for three quarters of all internet attacks, the majority of which come from Asia or South America. The UK wasn't amongst the top 10.

Not surprisingly, the majority of attacks are aimed at Windows, with 30% of all the attempts measured by Akami exploiting Port 135 - the port used for remote procedure calls in the Microsoft OS.

"One interesting observation about the ports that see the highest levels of attack traffic is that they were targeted by worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the internet several years ago," the report states.

"While that's not to say that there are not any current pieces of malware that attack these ports, it may point to a large pool of Microsoft Windows-based systems that are insufficiently maintained, and remain unpatched years after these attacks peaked and were initially mitigated with updated software."

Britain behind on broadband

The State of the Internet report also includes a league table of countries with the fastest broadband. And while, according to Akami, the UK has the sixth highest internet penentration, we're nowhere to be seen in the top 10 fastest countries.

South Korea leads the way, "with nearly 64% of connections to Akamai occurring at over 5 Mb/sec" in that country. Nations such as Belgium, Romania and Nepal manage to edge the UK out of the top 10.

The top 10 fastest broadband countries

1. South Korea
2. Japan
3. Hong Kong
4. Sweden
5. Romania
6. Belgium
7. US
8. Netherlands
9. Nepal
10. Norway