The State of the Internet

The good folks over at Akamai Technologies have released their first "State of the Internet" report. All the data was gathered over their entire global network. This report was based on data specifically oriented to attack traffic, broadband adoption and other such relevant data. This first report is based from January 2008 to March 2008.

The report is complete with nice looking pie charts and graphs showing the breakdown of a lot of different statistics, many of which I didn't know. They break down the attack traffic from where it originates and on what port (thus the type of attack) the attack is on. The country where the most attacks come from? Well, to me it wasn't a big surprise, but others might be surprised. China was the number one in this category.

The primary attack port was Microsofts RPC port, port 135. Akamai speculates that it might be a resurgence of some old trojans and viruses attacking unpatched machines. This may be the case, but recently there was a Microsoft SQL Injection attack that used Microsoft IIS which seemed to be concentrated in China. Microsoft SQL Server attacks were number six on the list, right behind WWW (web server) attacks. Note: web server attacks are not solely Microsoft IIS server, as Apache is another popular web server.

Other data they recorded was DoS and DDoS attacks. In the report they said that DDoS attacks are roughly 2% of all internet traffic. A post to the Arbor Weblog noted

Again, this is raw attack traffic, simply meant to exhaust connection state or fill links, nowhere in this mix is spam, phishing, scans, or other malicious or similarly annoying traffic.

The post also noted that DDoS traffic has peaked above 5%. Now think about all the traffic going on in the world right now, and 2% to 5% of that is going somewhere. I just hope it will never be me.

Akami also collected data targeted at other areas, such as unique IP address, interent penetration (how much of a country is connected) and also broadband adoption rates. Sadly, Canada doesn't show up very high in some of these results. Canada is number eight on the list of unique IP addresses with 9.8 million of them which is +4.2% since last time. The leader is the US with 98.8 million. As for internet penetration, Canada is last in the top 10 with 0.30. What does this mean? It means that there are 0.30 unique IP address per capita.

Broadband rates where next in the list with Canada not even making an appearance in the top 10 for broadband >5Mbps. The leader in this category was South Korea with 64% (a decrease of -4.7%) with >5Mbps. Wow, I'm moving to South Korea! They also had 0.16 unique IP's of ultra high broadband per capita.

Next was regular broadband of >2Mbps. Again, Canada failed to make an appearance in the top 10. The leader this time was South Korea again with 93% on >2Mbps broadband. 93% of the country is on broadband!

I am on broadband (>2Mbps) at home, so I count myself pretty lucky. It'll be interesting to see how this data changes over time as countries update their communications infrastructure. Hopefully Canada can place a little higher on the list in the future. Up here in the great white north it'll be a challenge just because of the logistics of our country as we are all spread out, and the majority of the population of Canada is within a 100 miles of the US boarder.