60% of World Wide Web Application Attacks Target USA

Sixty percent of all world wide web applications attacks targeted the United States in the first quarter of 2016, with the majority coming from China, USA and Turkey.

The Interpol 2015 Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment estimates that cybercrime is “well on the way to surpassing the drug trade.” Once about stealthy theft, cybercrime is increasingly becoming about hostile aggressions. Instead of subterfuge and covertness, there is a growing trend toward the use of extortion and ransomware against “individuals and businesses [that] bears the signature of organized crime.”

The Akamai Intelligent Platform regularly transmits between 15 – 30 percent of all Internet traffic. For the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same quarter in 2015, Akamai reported that denial of service (DDoS) attacks were up 40 percent, and repeat attacks rose dramatically. One customer suffered over 280 attacks in the 90-day period.

There were 19 “mega-attacks” involving 100 Gbps (billions of bits per second), a +137 percent increase from the prior year. The largest bandwidth attack was 289 Gbps.

The average duration of an attack was 16.16 hours. The top targets were:

1. Gaming (55%)
2. Software & Technology (25%)
3. Media & Entertainment  (5%)

There was a 28 percent increase in web application attacks. About 70 percent of the attacks were against HTTP, and 30 percent were against HTTPS. The top targets were:

1. Retail (43%)
2. Hotel & Travel (13%)
3. Financial Services (12%)