China Overtakes US as Top Source of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

More Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks originated in China than in any other country, followed by Germany and the United States, according to the Q1 2015 State of the Internet – Security Report by cloud services provider Akamai.

China is responsible for 23.45% of the world`s DDoS attacks, malicious attempts to make servers unavailable to users by interrupting the services of a host connected to the Internet, while 17.39% came from Germany and 12.18% from the US. The number of Chinese DDoS has risen 66% in attack source IPs compared with the US, although researchers say it could be attributed to the increase in redirected traffic from Asia.

The United States was the origin of 32% of DDoS attacks in Q4 2014, with China at 18%. The percentage drop does not indicate a decline in attacks from these countries, but rather a change in proportions as the number of total DDoS attacks worldwide soars.

DDoS attacks have increased 117% quarter-over-quarter and 35% quarter-on-quarter. The quarter set a record for the number of DDoS attacks observed over the Prolexic network, while the attack duration is now 43% longer than in Q1 2014, according to the report.

The US was the top source country of attacking IPs, at 52%, followed by China at 11% and Brazil at 6%, among source countries for web application attacks.

US-based websites were the most targeted for web application attacks in Q1 2015, receiving 82% of attacks, while no other country was targeted for more than 2% of attacks.

Retail, media/entertainment and hotel/travel were the most targeted industries for web application attacks in Q1 2015. This stems from previous attacks on the financial service sector, which hardened its security policy significantly. Meanwhile, retail and media attacks and breaches of 2014 signaled that these industries were softer targets, leading attackers to probe them for vulnerabilities.

Last week, the Chinese government said it will adopt a five-year cybersecurity program as part of a plan against cyber confrontation with the United States, as hotforsecurity.com has reported.