Akamai published its quarterly State of the Internet report on Tuesday covering global Internet speeds and Internet security from the last quarter of 2012. South Korea remained the leader in terms of Internet speeds, averaging a connection of 14 Mbps, TechCrunch reported. Speeds have fallen in the Asian country, however, by 4.8% since the third quarter of 2012 and by a whopping 13% since 2011. The United States ranked eighth in the world with an average connection speed of 7.4 Mbps, an increase of 28% year-over-year and of 2.3% since the third quarter of 2012.
Akamai also revealed that its customers reported 768 distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2012, an increase of more than three times the amount reported in 2011. The firm notes that over a third of the attacks targeted the commerce sector, while 20% went after enterprise customers.
“In many ways, DDoS has become the weapon of choice for multiple types of attackers, from political activists to criminals, and potentially even nation-states,” Akamai said in the report, adding that it didn’t include lower-level attacks that weren’t serious enough to require human interaction.
In the fourth quarter, 41% of attacks were found to have originated from China, an increase from 33% in Q3 of 2012, while the share of attacks that started inside the U.S. fell from 13% to 10%.
“Looking at the full year, China has clearly had the most variability (and growth) across the top countries/regions, originating approximately 16 [percent] of observed attack traffic during the first half of 2012, doubling into the third quarter, and growing further in the fourth quarter,” Akamai said.
