CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Akamai Technologies Inc. recently released its "State of the Internet" report for the second quarter of 2013, highlighting the change in worldwide connection speeds and the huge increase of "attack traffic" originating in Indonesia.
Akamai, a content delivery network, said that the quarter saw global average connection speed increasing 5.2 percent to 3.3 Mbps, with the global average peak connection speed rising 0.1 percent to 18.9 Mbps.
The fastest Internet speed was found in Hong Kong, where the average peak connection speed reaches 65.1 Mbps, while South Korea placed second with 53.3 Mbps.
The average connection speed in the U.S. clocked at 8.7 Mbps, and the average peak connection speed was 36.3 Mbps.
"Year-over-year, average connection speeds were up 9.2 percent, with nine of the top 10 countries/regions demonstrating positive growth of more than 10 percent," Akamai said. "Worldwide, 127 qualifying countries/regions saw a year-over-year increase in average connection speeds, ranging from 0.6 percent in Argentina (to 2 Mbps) to 262 percent in Côte d'Ivoire (to 1.6 Mbps)."
Akamai's report also looked into malicious Internet traffic, finding that 38 percent of such traffic comes from Indonesia. China was in second place with 33 percent, followed by the U.S. with 6.9 percent.
Akamai notes, however, that the country from which the attack traffic originates doesn't necessarily need to be the place where the attacker resides — the perpetrator could be anywhere in the world, launching attacks from compromised systems elsewhere.
The report highlighted attacks from a group called the Syrian Electronic Army, which went after news and media companies during the second quarter with "spear-phishing attacks" going after email accounts of employees, trying to gain access to Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and similar sensitive information.