The State of the Internet Report of Akamai Technologies, Inc. for the first quarter of 2014 was released yesterday, providing in-depth perspectives on important global issues affecting the ecosystem based on gathered data from its Intelligent Platform.

The report touches on key issues such as connections speeds, attack traffic and security, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack traffic and mobile connectivity, among others.

The average connection speed worldwide rose by 1.8 percent, continuing its stable growth in the recent quarters, but its average peak connection speeds declined by 8.6 percent in the first quarter of this year. Regardless, yearly trends continued to be at positive with a recorded 13 percent increase.

In terms of Internet attacks, the report says Akamai identified the topmost countries where the attack traffic comes from and the topmost ports being targeted by such attacks. It, however, clarifies that the originating country of the attack as classified by the IP address may not necessarily follow that the attacker represents that country or resides in that country.

“Note that the originating country as identified by the source IP address is not attribution — for example, a criminal in Russia may be launching attacks from compromised systems in China,” reads Akamai’s report.

The report shows the top 10 countries where attacks originate from, but these are based on sources of IP addresses, not attribution. Sitting on the top spot is China, which the report says is accountable for 41 percent of attacks observed. The recent figure is slightly lower as compared to the last quarter of 2013. On the second spot is the United States with 11 percent of attacks observed. Other countries include Indonesia (3rd), Taiwan (4th), Brazil (5th), Russia (6th), India (7th), Turkey (8th), South Korea (9th) and Romania (10th).

Speaking of attacks, DDoS attacks were reported to have decreased from 346 in the fourth quarter of 2013 to 283 in the first quarter of this year, representing a 20 percent decrease every quarter and a 27 percent decrease every year.

DDoS attacks by sector were also recorded, with the following figures: Enterprise (28%), Commerce (27%), Public Sector (20%), Media & Entertainment (16%) and High Tech (9%).

In terms of mobile connectivity, the average mobile connection speed ranged from 1.0 Mbps to 14.7 Mbps in the countries of Argentina and South Korea, respectively. South Korea was the lone country with above 10 Mbps threshold, 20 other countries were found to have average connection speed of above 4 Mbps.