Akamai Technologies—which provides the horsepower behind a lot of media delivery on the Internet—has published its “State of the Internet” report for the third quarter of 2009. Amongst the report’s findings: Russia and Brazil have unseated the United States and China as the top origin points for attack traffic on the Internet, accounting for some 22 percent of the world’s attack traffic during the quarter. Russia has easily taken the top spot, generating some 13 percent of the world’s cyber attack traffic during the third quarter of 2009 all by itself. The U.S. and China fell to third and fourth place, generating 6.9 and 6.5 percent of attack traffic, respectively.
Interestingly, the vast majority of attack traffic for the quarter—some 78 percent—attacked Windows file sharing, rather services like telnet, SMTP (email), Web servers, SSH, or even Microsoft Remote Procedure Call (RPC).
Akamai also breaks down measured broadband speeds by country: unsurprisingly, South Korea, Switzerland, and Japan top the list, with 90 percent or more of their broadband users having speeds over 2 Mbps. The United States came in 35th in the world, with 57 percent of broadband users having 2 Mbps or more at their disposal. South Korea also came in the fastest, with an average connection speed of 14.6 Mbps, far above number-two Japan which managed an average speed of 7.9 Mbps.
