March 27th, 2009
U.S. ranks highest in world for originating attack traffic in Q4 2008
More attacks traffic on the Internet came from the United States than any other country in the world last quarter, according to a new report from Akamai.
The U.S. ranked highest in the percentage of observed attack traffic, defined as unsolicited attempts to connect to unadvertised systems, in Q4 2008, according to Akamai’s State of the Internet report, to be released this Monday.
It was the first time the U.S. took top honors, placing over China and Japan after trailing the two countries throughout 2008. Taiwan and South Korea were also among the top 10.
In Q4 2008, Akamai observed attack traffic targeted at more than 20,800 unique ports, more than eight times the amount in the third quarter. The the third quarter in a row, Port 445 (Microsoft-DS) was attacked the most, and represented about 25 percent of traffic from the U.S. and Russia.
Outages
As reported here on ZDNet, the severing of three underwater cables in the Mediterranean on Dec.19 caused major outages in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, and more than 1,400 of Egypt’s and more than 450 of India’s globally routed prefixes/networks suffered outages.
Interestingly, of the social networking sites, Twitter experienced nearly twice the amount of downtime as peer sites, with 84 hours in 2008. (LinkedIn came in second with 45.8, while Facebook came in 11th with 7.2 hours.)
Broadband connectivity
Close to 20 percent of the world’s Internet users are connecting at speeds greater than 5 Mbps, according to the report. South Korea again ranks as country with highest percentage of connections at high broadband speeds, with average connection speed of 15 Mbps, or 10 times the global average.
(The U.S. ranked 17th globally, with an average connection speed of 3.9 Mbps.)
Additionally, South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway had more high broadband IPs per capita than in the prior quarter.
Within the U.S., the East Coast of U.S. continues to have highest penetration of high broadband connections (7 of the top 10 states were on the East Coast), and Nebraska and Kentucky saw a 33 percent improvement in connection speeds from the first quarter to the fourth quarter 2008.
The fastest U.S. state was Delaware, with an average of 7,280 kbps.
The slowest U.S. state was Alaska, with an average of 2,000 kbps.
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
