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Broadband leap a hotbed for cybercrooks: Akamai CSO
Broadband leap a hotbed for cybercrooks: Akamai CSO
By Melissa Chua | Jul 13, 2011
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PrintCountries making a sudden leap from dial-up to broadband Internet access are most at risk of playing unwitting host for attack traffic, said Akamai’s chief security officer Andy Ellis.
Citing results from Akamai’s state of the Internet report for Q4 2010, which showed Russia, Taiwan, Brazil and China to be the top four countries from which attack traffic generated, Ellis said in an interview with SecurityAsia that the machines most vulnerable to being zombies usually lay in markets where large scale broadband deployments and the abundance of connectivity overshadowed the need for security.
“We’re referring to users who have traditionally not lived in an environment where security comes to the forefront,” said Ellis. “Users who don’t patch and who don’t pay attention to the fact that their hard drive is swapping all the time are prime targets for attackers.”
Russia accounted for 10% of all attack traffic observed for the quarter, while the Asia Pacific front saw Taiwan and China combined account for close to 15% of malicious traffic.
Ellis added Akamai was observing more attacks and compromises in the Asia Pacific likely due to burgeoning high-speed connectivity in the region. The Akamai report showed China in particular reporting a 13% year-on-year increase in number of connections with speeds over 5 Mbps while Taiwan observed a 2.5% growth to have 29% of all broadband connections enjoying such speeds.
Attacks targeting machines and software running on non-English languages have also been on the rise, Ellis noted. The Akamai report showed that Port 9415 saw increased malicious traffic likely due to a Tencent QQ, a Chinese language IM client that had been targeted by malware. Attacks on Port 22, which accounted for 6.2% of malicious traffic globally, also largely originated in China.
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