Vinayak Hegde

One of the memorable events of the IETF meetings was a photo session for ISOC with the Vint Cerf as mentioned in my earlier post on IETF 75. The photo shoot was held after the welcome reception in the Stockholm City hall. The photos themselves were taken in the City hall complex facing the Stockholm skyline. Here are some photos from the IETF photo session. You can see me standing in the backrow alongside with Vint Cerf in some of the photos. My mentor at IETF, Al Morton, is the person in shorts in the front row. The ISOC fellows came from several countries including India, Kenya, Venezuela, Uganda, Brazil, Uruguay, Pakistan, Morocco and Bangladesh.

Photo Credits Lincoln McNey (ISOC – Internet Society)

Ronald Nsubuga (Uganda)	Hamid Mukhtar (Pakistan)	Eduardo Ascenço Reis (Brazil)	Dorcas Gachari (Kenya)	Md. Aminul Haque Chowdhury (Bangladesh)
Afaf El Maayati (Morocco)	Alberto Castro (Uruguay)	Alejandro Acosta (Venezuela)	Vinayak Hegde (India)	Muhammad Haris Shamsi (Pakistan)

Later we had a dinner at the Clarion Sign Hotel in Stockholm with our mentors and ISOC Staff. It was addressed by Vint Cerf.

Vint Cerf’s Business card

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