Akamai: US Home To Attacks, Slow Internet

By WebProNews Staff - Thu, 05/29/2008 - 12:41pm.

New quarterly report looks at connectivity and issues

The content delivery network tapped its resources to produce the first of what will be an ongoing look at the Internet on a quarterly basis.

In its position as a premier content delivery service, Akamai holds a perspective on Internet traffic, both good and malicious, that few others can match. The firm plans to share some of its observations through a new report.

An initial summary from Akamai for the first three months revealed how malicious attacks originated in 125 countries around the world. China and the United States represented the top two countries where attacks began.

The two nations accounted for roughly 30 percent of the origination of attacks during those three months. Many attacks focused on 23 unique ports, with attempts to deliver a host of malware through them.

Microsoft's Remote Procedure Call port 135 saw the most attacks hitting it, with nearly 30 percent of attacks trying to break into systems that way. Another 13 percent tried to tag NetBIOS through port 139.

Akamai also looked at connection speeds for Internet users around the globe. South Korea topped the list of countries with 5Mbps or greater connections, with 64 percent having those. The United States, with its concentration of broadband in the hands of a few multi-billion dollar telcos, comes in at a miserable seventh place with 20 percent, behind Belgium's 21 percent, embarrassingly enough.

Even Romania has more high-speed connections as a percentage of population than the country that invented the Internet in the first place. At least the US managed to stay ahead of Nepal, albeit not by very much.

News Tags: Technology, Akamai, Internet

Comments

Submitted by Chris Little (WPN reader) on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 1:37am.

Internet invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (UK)

A number of readers here rely on WPW being accurate and making sound statements of facts in articles, so it comes as a surprise that David Utter asserts that: "Even Romania has more high-speed connections as a percentage of population *than the country that invented the Internet in the first place*." I trust that he is not suggesting that the USA 'invented the Internet in the first place', as the UK were aware of the Internet long before the USA even had heard of the term. Most of us in the UK knew the work being carried out by (now) Sir Tim Berners-Lee before he became a Consultant at CERN in Switzerland and eventually to developing the whole concept of the Internet. Prior to becoming a Consultant, he worked at Plessey Telecommunications as a software engineer where he developed and worked on distributed systems, message relays, and bar coding. Subsequently, he developed a multi-tasking operating system, and typesetting software for intelligent printers at D.G. Nash. Having joined CERN in 1980, he developed his first hypertext system which he named Enquire and along the way had brought in Robert Cailliau as a partner in the project. Using the hypertext program which Berners-Lee had taken time out to develop was put on both mens computers and the two men began communicating with each other on December 25, 1990 via the world's first server at info-cern.ch. It is through his endeavours that Berners-Lee managed to persuade CERN to provide a certification on April 30, 1993, that the web technology and program code was in the public domain so that anyone could use it. Berners-Lee currently holds the 3Com Founders Chair, and has served as Director of the W3C Consortium since it was founded and has authorthered a large number of books on related subjects. All this was documented by Robert Cailliau on November 2, 1995 in 'A Short History of the Web', published in Paris.

Submitted by Guest (WPN reader) on Sun, 06/01/2008 - 7:00pm.

"I agree something has to

"I agree something has to change but your article is comparing apples to oranges."

But it doesn't make much sense either, to compare an apple with an apple..?

Well, maybe this is just another example of an old story repeating itself; that the first seldom also are the last as well..?

Submitted by Guest (WPN reader) on Fri, 05/30/2008 - 6:57am.

Bandwidth

Comparing USA with 300 million people and 9,629,091 sq/km to Romainia's 237,500 sq/km and 22 million people isn't a fair comparison.

Running cable TV and DSL grade telephone lines to rural America isn't possible. Many places cannot support an analog modem because of the distances and use satellite TV becuase they're not served by the cable companies.

I agree something has to change but your article is comparing apples to oranges.

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