2012 was a big year for advances in mobile device to web technology. Web traffic from mobile devices doubled from the fourth quarter of 2011 to the fourth quarter of 2012. This increase is due to the ease of access and speed with which mobile devices are able to access and download material online which has been getting faster each year. Of course, with this jump in the use of online services comes the negative.
As more and more people are accessing the web, so too were more hackers with underhanded, malicious motives. One company that handles the web services for clients all over the globe, Akamai, reported that their customers were targeted by 768 DDoS attacks.
This is a Distributed Denial of Service attack. It is one type of a denial of service attack that targets multiple systems, usually compromised with a Trojan horse worm or virus. This takes many forms but is usually a file, a picture or attachment that once opened embeds itself into the user’s computer. Once the virus is in place, the hacker floods the victim’s site using accounts worldwide, into the hundreds of thousands using different IP addresses. In effect, it shuts the victim’s website down.
While these attacks are usually politically motivated, some have used these attacks for other more nefarious purposes including capturing customer payment information or the personal information of employees of the company being attacked. According to Akamai, the chief source of these DDoS attacks seems to be China. Attacks coming from China made up 41 percent of the total number of attacks in the final quarter of 2012. Akamai cannot explain the jump in attacks from China. Attacks originating in the United States account for 10 percent of these attacks. The rest come from Turkey, Russia, Taiwan and Brazil.
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