2012 witnessed 768 DDoS attacks, says Report

A recent report by Akamai Technologies, China is responsible for over 40% of DDoS attacks across the world.

Taking into account data received from approximately 700 million unique IPv4 addresses from 240 countries/regions, the Akamai report  observed attack traffic from 177 unique countries/regions during the fourth quarter of 2012, down from 180 in the third quarter.

China has maintained its position as the single largest volume source of observed traffic at 41% of the total, up from 33% in the preceding quarter. The United States remained in the number two spot despite a drop in observed attack traffic, from 13% to 10% in the third quarter. Turkey took over Russia's number three spot with 4.7%.

The report says that the originating country as identified by the source IP address is not intended to imply attribution.

Akamai customers reported 768 DDoS attacks in 2012, up more than 200% from 2011. Of those, 35% targeted companies are in the commerce sector and 22% focused on media and entertainment organisation. Enterprise companies, including financial services, were subject to 20% of reported attacks; 14% targeted High Tech and 9% of reported attacks were directed toward public sector agencies.