Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise cloud hosting vendor Akamai reports-- Q2 2013 attacks on the company's customers grow by 54% Q-o-Q to 318, up from the 208 reported on Q1 2013.
Enterprise is the leading target of such attacks with 134 reports, followed by Commerce (91), Media & Entertainment (53), High Tech (23) and Public Sector (17).
According Akamai DDoS traffic is also becoming increasingly difficult to track, forcing the company to rely on customer reports to differentiate between legitimate and malicious traffic.
"Adversaries conducting DDoS attacks spend increasing effort to make their attacks look more and more like legitimate "flash mobs" in an effort to elude automated defenses; this creates an ever-escalating arms race to automate the manual analysis that often goes into assessing whether an event was an attack or legitimate traffic due to an unplanned event," the Akamai Q2 2013 State of the Internet Report states.
The top country of origin for malicious traffic in Q2 2013 is Indonesia (38%). China (33%) and the US (6.9%) follow, even if a number of high-profile attacks against news and media companies came from the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) using spear-phishing tactics to compromise internal email accounts in order to gain access to Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and other sensitive information.
Last year saw 768 DDoS attacks on Akamai customers, while H2 2013 saw 516 attack reports. On the other hand Q2 2013 sees a shift in attacks targetting EMEA businesses instead of more typical US and S. American targets.
The report also talks on the global internet penetration growth-- high broadband (greater than 10Mbps) connections are up by 14% Q-o-Q, while global average connection speeds are up by 17%.
"The Q2 2013 State of the Internet Report notes some significant milestones and trends," the company says. "[H]alf of all connections to Akamai occurred at speeds of 4 Mbps or higher, a 25% increase since Q1 2012."
