Hasta La Gadget!

Akamai’s back with yet another snapshot of the state of the internet and, surprise surprise, it’s reporting that DDoS attacks were up threefold last year versus 2011. That stat’s just one slice of the sprawling cybersecurity picture painted by the company, which also ranks China as the foremost perpetrator of “observed attack traffic” in Q4 2012, numbering that country’s share at 41 percent. To put that into better perspective, consider that the number two and three offenders — the U.S. and Turkey, respectively — are responsible for a shared 15 percent of that traffic, while former Cold War enemy Russia accounts for just 4.3 percent. On a continent-by-continent basis, the majority of these attacks originated in the Asia Pacific / Oceania region (about 56 percent), with North and South America accounting for 18 percent.

On a much lighter note, global high-speed broadband adoption (defined as any speed equal or greater than 10Mbps) grew by 2.7 percent last quarter, with top honors going to South Korea where nearly half the population enjoys super fast internet access. For the mobile flipside, Akamai found that average global speeds hovered between 8Mbps to 345kbps down, with peak downlink speeds coming in at 44Mbps to 2.7Mbps. The bulk of mobile data requests sent to Akamai’s platform saw Android’s Webkit browser and Apple’s Mobile Safari come in nearly neck-and-neck at 35.3 percent and 32.6 percent. Although when you expand that to overall network traffic, Safari reigns supreme with a 58.7 percent share. If you’re keen to digest even more of these sobering statistics, we recommend you hit up the source for the full executive summary and even more infographics.

Filed under: Internet, Mobile

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Source: Akamai

Denial of Service, or DDoS, attacks have been used for decades now, but they’ve become more popular in recent years that were aimed at popular software companies, video game networks, and a number of government agencies to name a few. Up until now, these DDoS attacks have been aimed at organizations, but now they seem to be aimed at individuals.

A DDoS attacker has taken aim at Apple’s iMessage program as a way of completely messing with an individual. iMessages can be sent to either a person’s iOS device or Apple computer as long as the attacker knows the person’s email address or phone number associated with the account. The string of characters are sent at such a high rate that it forces iMessages to crash, which makes it nearly impossible to use the service while the attacks are ongoing.

Unfortunately, there’s currently no way of blocking an iMessage user nor is there a setting to change the frequency the user receives messages. At this point in time, the only solution would be to not use iMessage, although we’re sure a number of you probably won’t find that as an acceptable option. Hopefully Apple catches wind of this method of DDoS attacks and will issue something to block it.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: ITC rules that Apple did not violate Motorola’s patent, remands case back to judge, Messages to be exclusive to OS X Mountain Lion,

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