Vinayak Hegde

Akamai recently released “State of the Internet” report for Q4 2008 which contains information about attack traffic (ss measured from more than 193 countries and attacking more than 20,000 ports), significant Internet events and Internet penetration and broadband adoption. Akamai has a good view of what happening on the internet as it’s distributed network has more than 42,000 servers deployed in almost all major ISPs across the world. Some highlights from the report:

• US and China were the top 2 countries from where attack traffic originated.
• Attack traffic spikes on so-called “Attack Wednesday” which typically follows Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday” when Microsoft releases patches fixing the vulnerabilties in it’s software.
• There is a push towards deployment of DNSSEC protocol after the DNS vulnerability uncovered vy Dan Kaminsky was made public.
• Fixed broadband adoption and capacity is increasing in several countries including Switzerland, Brazil, Italy Spain, Canada and India.
• Nordic Countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland) continue to lead the world in internet penetration.

The “State of the Internet” report contains lots of interesting information about security, internet penetration and adoption of technology on the Internet. Do check the endnotes for further links and references for the information in the report. You can download the report here.

There are similar reports by

• Admod on Mobile Metrics
• Opera on State of the mobile Web
• Symantec on Internet Security Threat Report
• Arbor Networks on Infrastructure Security Report

If you liked this then you may also like to read

• Akamai – State of The Internet Report Q3 2008
• Photos from IETF 75, Stockholm
• Akamai – State of The Internet Report Q2 2008