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

Some interesting highlights:

• The top 3 ports at which attacks were directed were Microsoft DS (449), NetBIOS (139) and Microsoft RPC (135). These 3 ports accounted for more than 50% of the attack traffic out of the 2400 ports at which attacks were directed.
• Vulnerabilities were found in core Internet protocols such as TCP, DNS and BGP and were being actively exploited.
• Asian countries improved their Internet connectivity with the rest of the world as new undersea cables were commisioned
• The Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark) have the most internet penetration and but Far-East Asian countries (South Korea and Japan) had the fastest broadband connectivity.

More detailed information is available in the downloadable PDF

Akamai has more than 36,000 servers across 70 countries serving content for various customers. This gives Akamai a bird’s eye view into systemic problems on the internet such as network outages, connectivity issues as well as end-user connectivity. Every quarter Akamai releases “State of the Internet” report which captures some of these trends. Here are some highlights from the report for Q2 2008.

Interesting Insights on India:

• Network connectivity speeds are catching up in India as the number of connections below 256Kbps is just 26%. The bad day of dialup are slowly going away.
• Broadband penetration is very miniscule though with 0.6% of users connecting with 5Mbps or more and 4.6% of users with 2Mbps or more.
• The relative amount of attack traffic originating in India has dropped with ranking falling to 15th from 10th in last quarter.

Interesting Insights on Security:

• There seem to be a lot of unpatched systems connected to the Internet with ports scanned by Sasser, Slammer and Sapphire worms being repeatedly targeted.
• The top 3 countries (Japan, US and China) contribute more than 60% of all attack traffic. Not surprisingly these countries are also the most connected.
• SQL Injection attacks are on the rise.

More detailed information is available in the downloadable PDF