According to State of the Internet" 's Akamai for the fourth quarter of 2012, the number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks increased by 200% compared to 2011.
Of the 768 attacks reported by 413 Akamai customers, 35% were directed at commercial companies, 22% targeted media and entertainment businesses, and 20% targeted other businesses.
14% of attacks targeted high-tech companies and 9% targeted public sector organizations.
As for the DDOS launched by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters group in the second phase of Operation Ababil, they continued to leverage the BroBot botnet. Their attacks were constantly changing in an attempt to evade filtering.
The BroBot botnet was capable of sending up to 18 million requests per second, so the websites of the targeted financial institutions were unable to fend them off.
When it comes to cyberattacks in general, most of them originated from China. However, the fact that 41% of attacks were identified as originating from China does not necessarily mean that the attackers are Chinese.
The list of countries where the largest attacks took place includes the US, Turkey, Russia, Taiwan, Brazil, Romania, India, Italy and Hungary.
Akamai is available here 's research
