Malicious hackers have a new favorite country.
Indonesia was the source of the most Internet attack traffic in the second quarter of 2013, pushing China out of the top spot in the quarterly “State of the Internet” report from Akamai (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AKAM]]).
The Cambridge, MA-based company, which handles about a third of global Internet traffic, tracked attacks from IP addresses in 175 different countries or regions during the quarter. It found that attacks starting at IP addresses in Indonesia almost doubled from the first quarter of the year, growing to 38 percent of all global attack traffic.
That doesn’t mean a ton of hackers just up and moved to Indonesia. Akamai’s study tracks the source IP address used by an attacker, and those people can start their work by hijacking an address .
“For example, a criminal in Russia may be launching attacks from compromised systems in China,” Akamai notes.
What the report does show is that, along with a growing rate of broadband adoption and Internet connection speed, Indonesia is seeing its vulnerability to exploits increase.
China represented 33 percent of all global attack traffic in the second-quarter study. It drops off dramatically after that, with the U.S. ranking third with slightly less than 7 percent of attacker IP addresses.
 |
Akamai also said it saw a dramatic increase in the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which attackers swarm their targets with a wide network of coordinated connections that drain resources, knocking a website offline.
Reports of DDoS attacks on Akamai customers jumped 54 percent from the first quarter to the second, which the company said could well be correlated with political unrest around the globe, including the ongoing civil war in Syria. As you might expect, most of those attacks were reported against enterprise or commerce targets in the Americas.
If this recent quarterly increase in DDoS attacks becomes more than a temporary blip, it could be a bad sign for the Internet as a whole, Akamai said.
“There is a very real possibility this trend will continue, and perhaps even accelerate, as the current geopolitical environment heats up,” the report notes. “If we continue to see a 50 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in DDoS attacks in coming quarters, the impact on the Internet as a whole will become a much bigger concern than it is now.”
