According to the Akamai Q4 2013 State of the Internet report DDoS attack traffic is up by 75% Y-o-Y (or 23% Q-o-Q), with attacks originating from 188 countries or regions, up from 185 in Q3 2013.
Attack traffic is also on the rise from the top 10 countries, with Q4 2013 attack concentration growing by 88%, up from 83% in Q3 2013 and down from 89% in Q2.
The most targeted port in Q4 2013 is port 445 (Microsoft-DS), being the top target in 6 of the top 10 countries/regions, including Germany, Romania, Russia, Taiwan, Canada and the US. Port 80 (WWW/HTTP) follows with 14% of all attacks, while port 443 (SSL/HTTPS) is at 3rd place with 8.2% of attacks.
DDoS attacks primarily target enterprise and commerce. The two sectors account for 70% of reported attacks. Akamai also reports the chance of repeated attacks is 35%, as 56 out of 162 surveyed organizations suffered repeated attacks during the quarter.
As well as attacks the Akamai report covers the overall global state of the internet. Average connection speeds in 10 top countries/regions are now above the "high broadband" threshold of 10Mbps, while average connection speeds for Q4 2013 are up by 5.52% Q-o-Q to 3.8Mbps.
Global broadband adoption is also up (by 4.3%), with 55% of all connections to Akamai being 4Mbps or higher.
"We've reached a significant milestone in the improvement of average connection speeds," Akamai says. "The fact that all of the top 10 countries/regions' average connection speeds are now at or exceeding the high broadband threshold-– and continued strong growth in countries like S. Korea and Ireland-– is indicative of the progress that's being made in broadband penetration. It's reasonable to expect these promising trends will continue to be reflected in future reports."
As for global internet penetration, Q4 2013 has a 3% increase in IPv4 addresses. IPv6 adoption also sees growth, while mobile connectivity sees further increases in speed and traffic.
