Likely few people would be surprised that China is the overwhelming source of global “attack traffic.” For the time being, not much can be done about it, if news reports can be taken as an indication.
Source: Thinkstock
According to the Akamai State of the Internet Q4 2014 report:
During the fourth quarter of 2014, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from source IP addresses in 199 unique countries/regions. Note that our methodology captures the source IP address of an observed attack, and cannot determine attribution of an attacker. China once again remained the top attack source, though its percentage declined to 41% in the fourth quarter from 49% in the previous quarter. Second place United States also saw a decline to 13% of total observed attack traffic. Likewise, the overall concentration of observed attack traffic decreased, with the top 10 countries/regions originating 75% of observed attacks in the fourth quarter.
The overall trend might be considered moderately positive. China’s role has to be taken as otherwise.
The report divides the victims of the attacks into two groups. The first is Enterprise, which roughly equates to the private sector. The second is Public, the name of which speaks for itself. In terms of patterns:
Attacks against Public Sector targets reported throughout 2014 appear to be primarily motivated by political unrest, while the targeting of the High Tech industry does not appear to be driven by any single event or motivation.
The trend confirms what has appeared to be a habit. Cyberattacks on government entities are not random. That will not change in the future, based on anything we know now. The extent to which digital government data has been besieged is not an accident.
The report from Akamai Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) falls against more and more news about the number and size of cyberattacks, as well as the inability of both government and the private sector to block them. The fact that China (and incidentally Russia) is high on the list only serves to make the threat more menacing.
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