Issued quarterly over the last four years, this fascinating report gives meaning to the statistics Akamai collects world-wide on such varied topics as broadband adoption, mobile traffic, attack traffic and Internet connection speeds by region, country and city. Trends based on stats from the previous quarter and the previous year are noted in geographic charts and ranked tables. The report just issued comes in at forty-six pages and is packed full of useful information.
For example, the data on Internet attacks was based on a "honeypot" strategy that logs how many attacks of varying types occur on an unprotected server and notes the source of the attack. The country of Myanmar in Southeast Asia was noted as an increasing source of Internet attacks, chiefly on standard Internet HTTP port 80 -- Internet attacks from Myanmar totalled over 9% of all attacks. Taiwan, however, was the #1 source of Internet attacks, accounting for 10% of the total. The USA was ranked third as a source with 8.3%, followed by China at 4th at 7.8% and Russia at 5th at 7.5%.
Equally interesting was the pattern of ports attacked. Port 445, used by Microsoft Directory Services, was the #1 target, followed by Port 80, Port 23 (Telnet), Port 443 (HTTPS or Secure Internet) and Port 1433 (Microsoft SQL Server). Over 70% of the attacks on Port 1443 came from China, aimed at hosted Microsoft applications not up-to-date with their security patches.
Not all of the report is so technical. Geographic stats point out the cities that have the fastest broadband connections, both peak and average -- it's no surprise that Hong Kong was at #5 on the average list and #1 on the peak list. Major cities of Japan and of South Korea filled the Top 100 of both lists with several interesting non-Asian exceptions:
o San Jose, California, USA, the home of Silicon Valley, was #9 average and #29 peak.
o Canberra, Australia and Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA, both just missed making the Top Fifty in both lists.
o Constanta and Timisoara, both in Romania, were prominent in both lists.
o Only a few European cities, other than the two Romanian ones, fell in the Top 100 of both the average and peak broadband lists.
Stats on the results of IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011 are also included in the report. The full report can be downloaded as a PDF from the Akamai website after completing a short registration form.
