Philippines ranks 13th in list of countries launching cyber-attacks

MANILA, Philippines—The Philippines has been tagged as one of the world’s biggest sources of a dangerous kind of cyber “attack” designed to take down entire computer networks and shut down key consumer services.

The latest report by Russian Internet security firm Kaspersky Labs showed that the Philippines ranked 13th on the list of 23 countries where “distributed denial of service” or DDOS attacks originated in 2011.

The Philippines was one of four Southeast Asian countries to make the list, the two others being Malaysia at 5th, Indonesia at 18th and Vietnam at 19th. Over 90 percent of all DDOS attacks came from the 23 countries on the list.

As much as 2 percent of these came from the Philippines, Kaspersky Labs analysts Maria Garnaeva and Yury Namestnikov said.

“DDOS attacks are used as an act of protest as well as a highly effective tool for exerting pressure on competitors,” Namestnikov said in a statement.

“It comes as no surprise therefore that online trade (online shops, auctions, message boards) was most frequently targeted,” he said.

Kaspersky said attacks were also conducted against businesses, including travel company websites. Unknown groups conducted these attacks during the summer season when travel was at its peak, as well as Christmas and New Year holidays.

A DDOS attack aims to make a computer or network unavailable to its intended users. This is done usually by a group or by a single user in control of several devices looking to stop a particular Internet site or service from functioning properly.

This is done by flooding a server with more network traffic than it is able to handle. This prevents the server from carrying out its normal functions and in some circumstances crashes the server completely.

Last year, the number of DDOS attacks around the world rose by 57 percent. “This figure may increase in the coming months of 2012,” Namestnikov said.

In 2010, the Philippines was one of the top 20 countries around the world with the highest incidence of cybercrimes. Of the list of 20, six were from the Asia Pacific region.