A survey of cyberspace says that the United States enjoys the honor of being the world's "top attack traffic source," accounting for 12 percent of all such malicious data—eight percent of the globe's in the third quarter of 2010.

This could represent the activities of "infected hosts that are looking for other hosts to spread to, or it may represent brute force attempts to log in to other systems," according to the Akamai Corporation's David Belson. It's all in the server maker's latest State of the Internet report (registration required).

Russia and China come second and third in the survey, although they've traded places since the second quarter of 2010. The US, Russia, and China now host 32 percent of all attack traffic.

The remaining seven of the top ten are Brazil, Taiwan, Egypt, Italy, Turkey, Peru, and Germany—the last's percentage has declined since the last quarter. Brazil's, on the other hand, has grown.

Port of call

The Akamai report also keeps track of the Internet protocol ports through which this mischief flows. The good news for Microsoft is that the attack traffic share for the Microsoft Directory Services file sharing port (Port 445) continues to decline. It is down from 78 percent of bad data in the third quarter of 2009—back when the Microsoft DS targeting Conficker worm was at its peak—to 56 percent in Q3.

"While the percentages are still fairly significant," the report notes, "this decline may signal ongoing efforts by network service providers to identify and isolate infected systems, as well as ongoing efforts to patch and/or upgrade infected systems." The intel isn't as good on mobiles, however. There Microsoft DS still leads the pack, hostile traffic-wise, at 75 percent.

The runners-up to Port 445 are telnet (Port 23) with 17 percent of traffic, SSH (Port 22) with 5.7 percent, Microsoft-RPC (Port 135) with 3.5 percent, and NetBIOS (Port 139) with 1.5 percent.

Telnet-related attack traffic got huge play in Egypt, Peru, and Turkey—responsible for as much as 33 percent of targeting. But "it is not clear if there is a common thread that connects these three countries," Akamai notes, "nor whether these observed attacks were brute-force login attempts, or some other botnet-related traffic."

Connection speeds

Akamai tracks Internet activity via the billions of data requests its many servers receive. Thus the company regularly comes up with a wide range of connection speed indexes which it discloses in its quarterly reports.

Among the latest findings:

Global average connection speeds are up. But South Korea's is slightly down. Its average connection speed dropped by 15 percent to 14Mbps. South Korea still tops the list, however, followed by Hong Kong (9.2Mbps), Japan (8.5), Romania (7.0), and the Netherlands (6.3).

"On a global basis, many African countries saw the largest quarterly increases, with many increases above 50%, and a couple in excess of 100%," the report also notes. "Of course, as these countries also generally had average connection speeds below 1Mbps, comparatively small shifts in average connection speeds can translate into large percentage changes."

Delaware rules in the US. The US is number 12 on the global list, with a third quarter average speed of 5.0Mbps. But many areas within the country exceeded that figure. Delaware came in at 7.1, followed by Utah with 6.4, the District of Columbia with 6.4, Rhode Island at 6.3, Vermont at 6.2, New Hampshire at 6.1, Massachusetts at 5.9, and California at 5.8.

Interestingly, although California isn't the top average speed connection state, many of its cities lead the nation in mean throughput rates, including the first- and second-place winners: San Jose (8.3) and Fremont (7.0). Next come Boston Metro, Riverside, CA, and Jersey City, NJ—all tying at 6.8Mbps.

US and China are IP address hogs. According to the report in Q3 2010 the United States and China could take credit for 38 percent of observed IP addresses (141,09,737 and 64,309,649 respectively).

China's IP count grew by 31 percent over the last year—the country added around 15 million unique IP addresses. But South Korea was no slouch either. Its aggregation of addresses shot up from Q2 by 11 percent.

And the fastest mobile provider is... a service in Russia with what Akamai says is the highest average connection speed, nearly 6Mbps, followed a Slovakian mobile provider.

Don't get too cocky though, Slovakia. The slowest service also continues to operate in your country: 143Kbps.