Akamai Releases First Quarter 0 State of the Internet Report

July 23, 2013 Akamai Releases First Quarter 2013 State of the Internet Report

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Chris Nicholson

Media Relations

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More than 733 million unique IP addresses connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform

Identified surge in observed attack traffic originating from Indonesia

Global average peak connection speed rose 36 percent year over year

CAMBRIDGE, MA july 23, 2013 Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, today released its First Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report. Based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform , the report provides insight into key global statistics such as network connectivity and connection speeds, attack traffic, and broadband adoption and availability, among many others.

The First Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report includes new observations on account checker attacks targeting e-commerce sites and the impact on Akamai traffic from events including the death of Hugo Chavez, announcement of the new Pope, and undersea cable disruptions. The report also reviews mobile browser usage by network type based on data from Akamai IO.

Highlights from Akamais First Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report:

Global Internet Penetration

More than 733 million unique IPv4 addresses from 243 countries/regions connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform, an increase of 3.1 percent over the previous quarter and 10 percent year over year. Since a single IP address can represent multiple individuals in some cases - such as when users access the Web through a firewall or proxy server - Akamai estimates the total number of unique Web users connecting to its platform during the quarter to be well over one billion.

Among the top 10 countries that connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform in the first quarter, quarterly growth ranged from 0.7 percent in Germany to 5.3 percent in China. Across the full set of observed countries/regions worldwide, nearly 75 percent saw a quarterly increase in unique IP address counts.

Year-over-year, the number of global unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai grew by 10 percent - an increase of more than 73 million over the first quarter of 2012. Among the top 10 countries, yearly growth ranged from 1 percent in the United States to double-digit growth in the United Kingdom (11 percent), Russia (15 percent), Italy (20 percent), China (20 percent) and Brazil (38 percent). Worldwide, nearly 75 percent of countries/regions had higher unique IP address counts year-over-year.

Attack Traffic and Top Ports Attacked

Akamai maintains a distributed set of unadvertised agents deployed across the Internet that log connection attempts, which the company classifies as attack traffic. Based on the data collected by these agents, Akamai is able to identify the top countries from which attack traffic originates, as well as the top ports targeted by these attacks. It is important to note, however, that the originating country as identified by the source IP address may not represent the nation in which an attacker resides. For example, an individual in the United States may be launching attacks from compromised systems anywhere in the world.

Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 177 unique countries/regions during the first quarter of 2013, the same number that was observed in the fourth quarter of 2012. While China kept its position as the single-largest volume source of observed traffic with 34 percent of the total (down from 41 percent in the previous quarter), Indonesia took over second place with 21 percent of observed traffic (up from 0.7 percent in the previous quarter). The United States dropped from second to third with 8.3 percent of observed traffic (down from 10 percent in the previous quarter).

The top 10 countries/regions generated more than 80 percent of the observed attack traffic during the quarter. More than half of the total observed attack traffic originated from China and Indonesia.

Port 445 (Microsoft-DS) continued to be the most targeted port in the first quarter, receiving 23 percent of observed attack traffic. Port 80 (WWW HTTP) was second at 14 percent, with a majority of these attacks observed to be originating in Indonesia.

Observations on DDoS Attacks

Starting in the fourth quarter of 2012, the State of the Internet Report includes insight into DDoS attacks based on reports from Akamai customers. In the first quarter of 2013, Akamai customers reported 208 attacks, up slightly from the 200 reported in the previous quarter. Of those attacks, 35 percent targeted Enterprise customers; 32 percent were focused on Commerce customers; 22 percent on Media customers; 7 percent on High Tech customers; and 4 percent targeted Public Sector customers. Attacks were reported by 154 different organizations in the first quarter of 2013.

Account Checker Attacks

In the first quarter of 2013, Akamai observed attempted account takeover behaviour for numerous e-commerce organizations that resulted from reuse of credentials obtained from other sites. Using automated tools known as account checkers, attackers can quickly determine valid user ID/password combinations across a large number of e-commerce sites. Once an account is breached, attackers can collect a users personal data and credit card information to use for further fraud.

Global Average and Peak Connection Speeds

Quarter-over-quarter, the global average connection speed rose 4 percent to 3.1 Mbps (up from 2.9 Mbps). A total of 117 countries/regions that qualified for inclusion saw average connection speeds increase this quarter, ranging from 0.7 percent in Kuwait to 75 percent in Guatemala.

LINK:	http://uk.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2013/press_072313.html...
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