China, Japan, And Australia Amongst Top APAC Nations Hit With Botnets

Nations with robust or growing IT networks remain the main source of cybercriminal activities, with five Asia-Pacific markets amongst the top 20 to be hit by bot traffic last year.

China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia experienced some of the highest volume of bot traffic in 2017, according to data from CenturyLink's Threat Research Labs, which assessed an average of 195,000 threats a day.

Specifically, botnets affected 104 million unique targets, including servers, handhelds, and other internet-connected devices, the security vendor said.

The US, China, Germany, Russia, and the UK were the top five countries to be hit by bot traffic last year.

The US, China, and Russia, though, also were the top three most common origins of malicious traffic. And in Asia-Pacific, the top five countries that hosted the most command-and-control servers (C2s). which gathered and directed botnets, were China, South Korea, Japan, India, and Hong Kong.

Hackers typically need C2 servers to create and control botnets and launch attacks, CenturyLink explained, adding that botnets could comprise breached servers or Internet of Things (IoT) device such as security camera and mobile phones.

The vendor said it captured more than 1.3 billion security events a day last year, based on 114 billion NetFlow instances, and tracked 5,000 known C2s.