Akamai report details web attack patterns and techniques

Malware traffic coming from the US has doubled in three months

The United States, Russia and China are the worst global sources of malicious traffic, according to the latest State of the Internet report from global services provider Akamai.

The results are pulled from a network of 60,000 servers and billions of internet requests per day, and reveal interesting details of the latest attack techniques, as well as new figures on the number of global internet connections.

Akamai said that the amount of bad traffic coming from the US had doubled in the past quarter to just under 13 per cent.

In terms of internet connections, the UK is sixth in the list of unique IP addresses with 20,008,664. Overall, there are 465 million addresses, a 16 per cent year-over-year increase, according to the report.

Akamai also revealed that there are just four UK cities in the top 100 list of broadband connection speeds, namely Oxford (5th), Southampton (57th), Bristol (58th) and Cambridge (73rd), with average speeds of 14463Kbit/s, 8371Kbit/s, 8292Kbit/s and 7840 Kbit/s respectively.

Some 62 per cent of the fastest connections are found in Asia, and 48 per cent in Japan. Just a fifth are in North America.

Attack traffic is coming from 198 countries, Akamai said, a slight drop from 207 in the previous quarter. Russia is the worst offender, accounting for 13 per cent of all traffic, followed by China, the US and Brazil.

Port 445 saw the most bad traffic at three quarters of all malicious code.