Hasta La Gadget!

According to Akamai’s State of the Internet report, cyberattacks tripled last year. Akamai is one of the largest distributed networks around the world, it reported that distributed denial of service attacks tripled in 2012 as compared to the previous year. The company’s customers went through 768 DDoS attacks in 2012, majority of the attacks were targeted towards commerce sector while roughly 20% were targeted towards Akamai’s enterprise customers. The company is only counting attacks that require human interaction for mitigation. Attacks that are automatically mitigated without requiring no or little human interaction have not been factored in the report.

41% of fourth quarter attack traffic originated from China, up 8% from the attack traffic of third quarter. China has been criticized much recently for cyberattacks originating from its soil. Only yesterday it was reported that U.S. is now going to take a firm stand against cyberattacks from China, this firm stand could entail visa restrictions for individuals involved in such attacks and even economic sanctions. Akamai’s report doesn’t have an explanation as to why attack traffic from China increased substantially in the final quarter of 2012. Attack traffic that originated from the U.S. decreased to 10% in the fourth quarter, as compared to 13% in the previous quarter.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: AP Twitter Account Was Hacked, White House Bombing Tweet Is Bogus, Facebook Pages New Mobile Layout Announced,

To no one’s real surprise, the culprit behind all the hackings against the United States is the Chinese Army. Specifically, they’re known as the ‘Comment Crew’ or ‘Shanghai Group’ (two rather non-intimidating names if you ask me) and they’re in P.L.A. Unit 61398, a 12-story office tower located just outside of Shanghai. That little building is responsible for much of the cyber attacks against the US from China. More »

Whatever you think of Iran’s politics, it’s hard to deny that the country has frequently been the target of internet-based attacks that sometimes go beyond the originator’s plans. If you believe High Council of Cyberspace secretary Mehdi Akhavan Behabadi, the pressure is only getting worse. He tells Iranian media that the nation is under “constant” digital bombardment and was just hit with a major assault on Tuesday that bogged down local internet access. Behabadi unsurprisingly contends that the attacks are deliberate efforts to undermine Iran’s data, nuclear and oil infrastructures, with a finger implicitly pointed westward. While it’s no secret that the country’s enemies want to slow down what they see as a rush towards nuclear weapons, it’s difficult to know how much of the accusation is serious versus bluster: we’ve seen individual smartphone users who consume more than the “several gigabytes” of traffic that reportedly caused national chaos in the most recent incident. No matter the exact nature, it’s likely that residents stand to lose as Iran fences off the internet to keep outside influences, hostile and otherwise, from getting in.

[Image credit: Amir1140, Wikipedia]

Filed under: Networking, Internet

Iran claims to have been hit by ‘heavy’ cyber attack, pins slowdowns on coordinated hacking campaign originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 01:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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