Russia & Brazil now the major source of cyber attacks

Stuart Corner
Friday, 29 January 2010 13:51

Your IT - Home IT

According to Akami's latest state of the Internet report, Russia and Brazil have unseated the US and China as the leading sources of Internet attacks and between them now account for 22 percent of the total.

Russia accounted for 13 percent of attack traffic compared to only 1.2 percent in the prior quarter. Brazil's contribution rose from 2.3 percent to 8.6 percent. In contrast the US contribution fell from 15 percent to 6.9 percent and China's from 32 to 6.5 percent. Fifth and sixth ranked attack sources, Italy and Taiwan also showed significantly increased contributions, from 1.2 to 5.4 and from 2.3 to 5.1 percent respectively.

Commenting on the findings Akami said: "Port 445 was overwhelmingly the top port targeted by attacks originating in Russia and Brazil, which may indicate the presence of a large number of systems in both countries actively participating in Conficker-related botnets. (Prior research from CERT has indicated that both Russia and Brazil were among the countries with the highest levels of Conficker infections.)"

According to Akami, port 445 accounted for 80 percent of attacks and the top 10 of almost 4000 ports targeted accounted for 95 percent of attack traffic. And it says that Conficker is far from dead. "Although mainstream and industry media coverage of the Conficker worm and its variants has dropped significantly since peaking in the second quarter, it is clear from this data that the worm (and its variants) is apparently still quite active, searching out new systems to infect."

Akami also intends in future reports to provide information on Internet access from mobile devices. It will publish insights into metrics collected from connections to Akamai that have been identified as coming from networks associated with mobile providers.

Its latest report provides average connection speeds only from three of the leading mobile providers in the US. It determined connection speeds to be between 700Kbps and 750Kbps and says that, over time, the number of metrics and mobile providers examined will be expanded.

'¢ Keep tabs on the net from your iPhone
Akami, which claims to deliver about 20 percent of the world's Internet traffic via its network of 56,000 servers - has launched a free iPhone app that promises to allow users to "Monitor Internet traffic, events and trends...in real time...right from your phone."

The Internet Visualizer app allows users to monitor traffic by geography, see peak traffic loads, and display a number of Internet metrics in real time. It is available via http://akamai.com/DV3App, which redirects to the iTunes store.