What country serves up the biggest share of online attacks? The U.S., you say? It’s the world’s largest and most advanced economy. China maybe? Its growing fast, with billions of citizens and hundreds of millions of Internet users. How about Russia?
Try Myanmar. The southeast Asian country that’s one of the world’s poorer and ruled by a brutal, authoritarian government is also the new top source of global attack traffic, according to a new report from Web content hosting firm Akamai.
Akamai’s State of the Internet Report found that Myanmar was the source of some 13% of online attacks, beating out the likes of the U.S. and Taiwan. The report’s findings came as something of a surprise. Myanmar, a country that was formerly known as Burma, wasn’t even in the top ten in any previous list of top ten countries for Internet attacks. Hong Kong also returned to the top ten, a place it hasn’t held since 2008.
The anomaly appears to be linked to massive denial of service attacks directed at specific Web servers. The Myanmar government, itself, was the target of DDoS attacks in November, 2010 that effectively knocked the country offline.
In February and March, 2011 Akamai said it recorded targeted attack traffic aimed at just 25 unique ports, that accounted for 13% of the attack traffic for Q1. Around half of the ports targeted related to Web activity on Port 80.
The US and Taiwan as well as Russia, China, Brazil, Romania, and India filled out the list of countries that were the origin of most of the recorded Internet attacks.
Akamai also found evidence (if more is needed) that the problem of Web based attacks continues to fester. Attack traffic over port 80, the central port for World Wide Web traffic, saw a seven-fold increase in attack traffic, the company said.
