China Leads the World in Cyberattack Traffic

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Likely few people would be surprised that China is the overwhelming source of global “attack traffic.” For the time being, not much can be done about it, if news reports can be taken as an indication.

According to the Akamai State of the Internet Q4 2014 report:

During the fourth quarter of 2014, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from source IP addresses in 199 unique countries/regions. Note that our methodology captures the source IP address of an observed attack, and cannot determine attribution of an attacker. China once again remained the top attack source, though its percentage declined to 41% in the fourth quarter from 49% in the previous quarter. Second place United States also saw a decline to 13% of total observed attack traffic. Likewise, the overall concentration of observed attack traffic decreased, with the top 10 countries/regions originating 75% of observed attacks in the fourth quarter.

The overall trend might be considered moderately positive. China’s role has to be taken as otherwise.

The report divides the victims of the attacks into two groups. The first is Enterprise, which roughly equates to the private sector. The second is Public, the name of which speaks for itself. In terms of patterns:

Attacks against Public Sector targets reported throughout 2014 appear to be primarily motivated by political unrest, while the targeting of the High Tech industry does not appear to be driven by any single event or motivation.

The trend confirms what has appeared to be a habit. Cyberattacks on government entities are not random. That will not change in the future, based on anything we know now. The extent to which digital government data has been besieged is not an accident.

The report from Akamai Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) falls against more and more news about the number and size of cyberattacks, as well as the inability of both government and the private sector to block them. The fact that China (and incidentally Russia) is high on the list only serves to make the threat more menacing.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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