More Than Half Of Cyberattacks Come From Asia

Asia is a hot spot for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and other types of online attacks, and, not surprisingly, DDoS attacks have spiked during the past few months.

It has been a busy year or so DDoS attacks: A new report from Akamai shows a 2,000 percent increase in the number of incidents during the past three years. The Anonymous hacktivist group contributed to that spike, as did politically motivated country versus country attacks, according to Akamai.

"Hacktivist activity has really accounted for a significant part of that growth, [as well as] spats between individual countries attacking one another," says John Summers, vice president of dynamic site solutions at Akamai.

And while website takedowns waged by HTTP-borne DDoS attacks have been all the rage lately, attacks targeting Port 80/HTTP declined in Q3 2011 by about a third of what they were in Q2 2011, and attacks on telnet/Port 23 grew that much. Akamai attributes the Telnet attacks to attacks from Egypt, where there were 18 times as many telnet attacks as other ports, and South Korea, where telnet attacks were four times the number of port attacks versus others.

No one is immune from DDoS attacks anymore, thanks to the rise in hacktivism. "It used to be if you didn't have a big brand or weren't making a lot of Web presence, if you went down it was an annoyance or inconvenient. And the odds were really low" that you'd be DDoS'ed, Summers says.

"That's totally changed," he says. "You cannot predict if you're going to go down."

Meanwhile, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for more than 49 percent of attack traffic in the third quarter of 2011, up from 47 percent in the previous quarter. Indonesia led the way with 14 percent of that traffic, followed by Taiwan and China. South Korea's attack traffic tripled, up to about 4 percent of the Asian attack traffic.

Europe accounted for about 28 percent of the global attack traffic, and North and South America, about 19 percent.

A full copy of the Akamai report is available here.

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