Reported Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) DDoS attack traffic has grown by 23 percent quarter-over-quarter, according to Fourth Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report by Akamai.
Customers reported a total of 1,153 DDoS attacks in 2013, which represents a 50% increase from 768 in 2012.
Enterprise (159 attacks) and commerce (82 attacks) continued to be the industries targeted most frequently by the reported DDoS attacks in the fourth quarter.
Both enterprise and commerce together account for just under 70% of the reported attacks during the quarter.
56 of the 162 organisations that were attacked suffered repeated threats throughout the quarter. While this was a one in four probability in the third quarter, the chance of a repeated attack increased significantly to just over one in three (35%) in the fourth quarter of 2013.
Improvement of connection speed
The global average connection speed has continued to improve, and Akamai has recorded a quarterly increase of 5.5%, reaching 3.8 Mbps.
South Korea was at the top spot from quarter to quarter, and reported the highest average connection speed of 21.9 Mbps.
133 qualifying countries/regions ended the year with higher average connection speeds than the year before, and this contributes to an increase of 27% from the end of 2012.
Hong Kong and South Korea remain the only two countries/regions above 60 Mbps, at 68 Mbps and 64.4 Mbps, respectively. Also, the global high broadband adoption rate increased by 56% from the fourth quarter of 2012.
"We've reached a significant milestone in the improvement of average connection speeds," said David Belson, editor of the State of the Internet Report. "The fact that all of the top 10 countries/regions' average connection speeds are now at or exceeding the high broadband threshold - and continued strong growth in countries like South Korea and Ireland - is indicative of the progress that's being made in broadband penetration. It's reasonable to expect these promising trends will continue to be reflected in future reports."