Last month, Akamai released its State of the Internet Report for the first quarter of 2017. Data in the report was gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform and used to analyze global trends in connectivity and current threats to security.
Global connection speeds and broadband adoption both showed significant increases, as well as global mobile connections. With regard to web security, the report focused primarily on DDoS attacks, with Martin McKeay, the senior editor State of the Internet / Security Report, remarking that, “Use cases for botnets like Mirai have continued to advance and change, with attackers increasingly integrating Internet of Things vulnerabilities into the fabric of DDoS botnets and malware. It’s short sighted to think of Mirai as the only threat, though. With the release of the source code, any aspect of Mirai could be incorporated into other botnets. Even without adding Mirai’s capabilities, there is evidence that botnet families like BillGates, elknot, and XOR have been mutating to take advantage of the changing landscape.”
Highlighted statistics from the report are included below. A full version of the State of the Internet Report can be downloaded via Akamai’s State of the Internet site.
- Average connection speeds increased 15% in 2016, bringing them to 7.2 Mbps this quarter, with the highest average in South Korea at 28.6 Mbps.
- Peak connection speed increased to 44.6 Mbps, up 28% since last year, and were at their highest in Singapore, which had a peak speed of 184.5 Mbps this quarter.
- Among mobile connections, 37 of Akamai’s surveyed countries had an average connection speed of at least 10Mbps, and 70 countries were above 4Mbps, both up from last quarter.
- Average mobile speeds were highest in the UK at 26 Mbps and lowest in Venezuela, with Germany leading the globe in peak connection speeds at 200Mbps.
- Disruptions to connectivity this quarter included submarine cable breaks that affected traffic in Madagascar and the Marshall Islands, as well as an unknown outage in Gabon and government-led Internet blocking in Iraq to prevent cheating during national middle-school and high-school exam days.
- In web application security, the United States continues to be the top source of attacks, with the Netherlands ranking second.
- Top attack vectors in web application security this quarter were SQLi, LFI and XSS.
- Among DDoS attack vectors, UDP fragment, DNS and NTP continued to top the list, along with reserved protocol and connection floods.
- A new reflection attack vector, Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), has been observed that is comparable to DNS reflection attacks.
- Reflection attacks were the most common of DDoS attack vectors, accounting for 57% of mitigated attacks this quarter.