There may be an atmosphere of heightened international tension over alleged cyber warfare and ‘attacks’ on Websites in the wake of the Sony hacking allegations but at least according to Akamai, which keeps tabs on these things from its own infrastructure, the incidence of so-called DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks is actually reducing globally.

Akamai is still probably the world’s leading content distribution specialist and as such is able to compile some indicative statistics on the state of the global Internet: things like average speed of connection in each country over time can make interesting reading (although this year there’s nothing particularly interesting to note as all territories seem to be improving or not at about the same rate). But security trends are showing some interesting moves and changes. 

Akamai says its customers reported 270 DDoS attacks for the second quarter in a row, which represents a 4.5 per cent reduction in attacks since the beginning of 2014 and a 4 per cent decrease in comparison to the third quarter of 2013. The number of attacks fell in both of the Americas, with 142 attacks, and in the Europe,Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, with 44 attacks.

However, the number of attacks in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region rose by a whopping 25 per cent from the previous quarter, to 84.

The industries being attacked has remained the same though: Akamai says  commerce, enterprise, high tech, media and entertainment, and the public sector all saw the same number of attacks as the previous quarter, even though the actual targets of these attacks changed. Meanwhile, enterprise attacks have fallen by more than a third from 127 to 80. At the same time, attacks against high tech companies have tripled from 14 to 42.