Top 10 Source of Distributed Attack
Recently security service provider SecureWorks Inc.has published a report showing that United States of America was the top source of distributed attack traffic. These figures are based on Company’s 2,000 customers so far in 2008. According to SecureWorks, 20.6 million attacks originated from U.S. computers and 7.7 million from Chinese computers. Top 10 Source of Distributed Attack
| Country | Number of Distributed Attack |
| United States of America | 20600000 |
| China | 7700000 |
| South Korea | 162,289 |
| Poland | 153,205 |
| Japan | 142,346 |
| Russia | 130,572 |
| Taiwan | 124,997 |
| Germany | 110,493 |
| Canada | 107,483 |
| Brazil | 16,987 |
Hunter King, a security researcher at SecureWorks, Said
It clearly shows that the United States and China have a lot of vulnerable computers that have been compromised and are being used as bots to launch cyberattacks. This should be a warning to organizations and personal computer users that not only are they putting their own computers and networks at risk by not securing them, they are providing these cybercriminals with a platform from which to compromise other computers.
Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at SecureWorks, Said
These findings illustrate the ineffectiveness of simply blocking incoming communications from foreign IP addresses as a way to defend your organization from cyber attacks, as many hackers hijack computers outside their borders to attack their victims. The Georgia/Russia cyber conflict was a perfect example of this. Many of the Georgian IT staff members thought that by blocking Russian IP addresses they would be able to protect their networks, however, many of the Russian attacks were actually launched from IP addresses in Turkey and the United States so consequently they were hit hard. This was a perfect example where we saw Russian cyber criminals using compromised computers outside their borders. On the other hand, we have found that many of the Chinese hackers will compromise large networks within their own country and use them as bots to attack other organizations. For example, entire university networks in China will belong to local hacker groups China’s hackers do create botnets from spamming through email and blogs, but a relatively larger percentage of the compromised hosts under Chinese control are simply machines in schools, data centers, companies — in other words, on large networks — that are mostly unguarded and consequently are entirely controlled by hacker groups, as opposed to distributed bots harvested from widely distributed international spam runs And often the groups have an insider in the networks they own. We also see many local hacker groups in Japan and Poland compromise hosts within their own country to use in cyber attacks, so the Chinese hackers are not alone in using resources within their own borders.
Computer security can be greatly improved by keeping your web browser and operating system up to date, using the latest versions of antivirus and antispyware software, following safe computer practices such as being wary of the websites you visit, and not clicking on attachments and links within emails until verifying that the sender intentionally sent the enclosed link or attachment.
