It will take time to understand who “wins” that war, and in the digital age it will also take time to even understand who was participating. But for a baseline, Cloudflare has released data to show the top 10 countries where a certain kind of hack is coming from — specifically, application-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
A DDoS attack involves directing large amounts of traffic, often from a bot network, to a system in order to overwhelm its capacity and prevent it from performing its functions. An application-layer attack specifically targets the place where a human would interact with that resource; an easy example is hackers flooding a website with traffic so that it won’t load for legitimate users.
According to Cloudflare, the top 10 sources of DDoS attacks are:
- China
- U.S.
- Brazil
- India
- Malaysia
- Indonesia
- Russia
- Germany
- Ukraine
- Spain
The data measures the percentage of total traffic in a country associated with DDoS attacks, but the list more or less reflects many of the top countries in the world by population. Three of the countries on the list, however — Malaysia, Ukraine and Spain — appear to be “punching above their weight,” with relatively small populations compared to the other big hacking countries.
Although it hasn’t updated its data in some time, more general hacking numbers from Akamai in the past have put Turkey, Taiwan, Romania, Italy and Hungary among the most active countries for hacking activity in the world.
