China and U.S. lead in Internet attacks

[Capper]

China and the U.S. lead the world as the two biggest sources of Internet attack traffic, according to a report published by the content distribution company Akamai.


Akamai, which operates a global server network that helps distribute and accelerate rich media across the Internet, released its first quarterly "State of the Internet" report on Thursday.


One of the key findings of the report revealed that China and the U.S. were home to the greatest percentage of Internet attacks, such as denial of service attacks and hacking attempts for the first quarter of 2008. Almost 17 percent of this traffic originated from China, while the U.S. trailed close by with 14 percent of this traffic coming from computers based here.
In total, 10 countries in the list accounted for nearly 75 percent of all attacks, Akamai said. These countries included Argentina, Brazil, Japan, India, South Korea, and Taiwan.


The most common attacks were associated with Microsoft Windows. About one-third of the attacks were on port 135, which is used for remote procedure calls using the Windows operating system.


Akamai pointed out that a lot of the attacks came from "worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the Internet several years ago." The company hypothesizes that this might indicate that a lot of the attack traffic could be coming from "a large pool of Microsoft Windows-based systems that are insufficiently maintained, and remain unpatched years after these attacks 'peaked' and were initially mitigated with updated software."


Some other notable findings included some interesting statistics on broadband speeds throughout the world.


Not surprisingly, South Korea had the highest levels of high broadband connectivity, which is defined by offering broadband download speeds greater than 5 Mbps. Japan cam in second and the U.S. ranked seventh.
Within the U.S. the tiny states of Delaware and Rhode Island had the highest concentration of "high broadband connectivity." Delaware had more than 60 percent of its connections providing more than 5 Mbps per second. About 42 percent of Rhode Island's connections offered speeds of 5 Mbps or more. Washington state ranked as the slowest state in terms of high speed connections. About 21 percent of its connections were under 256 Kbps. Other slow states included Illinois, Virginia and Georgia. Washington, D.C. also ranked low.


The country with the slowest Internet speeds was Rwanda with 97 percent of its connections under 356 Kbps. The Solomon Islands, Ethiopia, and Cuba were also among the slowest countries.


This was the first report issued by Akamai. The company plans to publish further reports each quarter.

China and U.S. lead in Internet attacks

[screwballl]

So how about someone reverse engineer these "botnets" and force the systems to get the windows updates that patches these vulnerabilities... it will not only help with the spam problem but also help speed everyones internet traffic up.

[onebxr]

How about we go old school and start using letters, stamps, and the telephone?
About as likely as your scenario, because once you get one finger in the dike, another leak will spring from somwhere else!
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[drew and not u]

Originally Posted by onebxr

About as likely as your scenario, because once you get one finger in the dike, another leak will spring from somewhere else!
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I see what you did there.

[screwballl]

Originally Posted by onebxr

How about we go old school and start using letters, stamps, and the telephone?
About as likely as your scenario, because once you get one finger in the dike, another leak will spring from somwhere else!
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how? 95% of infected machines can be fixed by simply downloading and installing the needed windows updates. The rest (which is still a large number of PCs) will need an antivirus program installed to scan and protect the computers. Even something simple and small and open source like ClamAV will help reduce the damage or infection.

[onebxr]

I will bet you that your, mine and everyones computer is infected or being monitored, or used with at least 3 things noone ever knows about. These may not be malicious but they are still there.
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[screwballl]

nope
My firewall reports everything and blocks unknown inbound or outbound traffic. I would know about it.

[onebxr]

so you dont think that the top minds in China or the US have a way to get around your network? I maybe bordering on paranoia here but I think it would be naive to think that we are toally safe from all internet attacks.
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[screwballl]

With proper firewalls in place and a properly patched system, there would be little chance of them getting in... but on the flip side, there really would be no point for them to as they are looking for corporate and government networks to tap into.
As the story was about individual users' computers being compromised, I do know mine is safe against those attacks and attempts.
Combine the NAT hardware firewall with Comodo software firewall and there is no chance for any current threat to get in... aside from some specially trained hacker that wouldn't even bother with a home user's IP.

[onebxr]

PWN 2 OWN contest lets hackers choose Vista, OS X or Linux - Engadget
so this means nothing to you? where do you think the govt.'s get their talent? From the private sector. Where do you think those people learn their skills? You and I.
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