Watching Hacking Attempts in Real Time

This animated graphic by T-Mobile is surprisingly interesting. What you see below is a static screen shot; the site itself says it offers a depiction of ongoing cyber-attacks

.

Here's the policy point: Everything I've heard from cyber-security experts over the years has emphasized that China is one of many important sources of cyber-assaults, rather than being in an ominous category of its own. That's what this rendering also suggests -- but I think you'll find it interesting to check out for yourself.

UPDATE There is of course a reason why Chinese hacking has gotten more attention than intrusions from Russia, Nigeria, etc: of the intrusions from China appear to be government- or military-directed than from most other countries.

Also, the chart above is meant as an interesting illustration, as opposed to anything purporting to be a comprehensive map of who is doing what to whom. As a reader from the tech world writes:

I trust the statistics are for attacks wherein there has been at least one complete exchange of packets with the purported source.  Eg the attacker has sent a packet, the destination has sent a packet in response, and something based on that response bas come from the purported attacker - such as happens with the TCP connection establishment handshake.   If it is based solely on the source IP address of a single inbound datagram it will be very vulnerable to IP address spoofing.  In that case, for all we know it could be the Duchy of Grand Fenwick spoofing IP addresses in their quest for Internet Domination (™).

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/RLoDni0oFts/story01.htm