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Every quarter Akamai issues its State of the Internet report. It offers our view and insight that we have compiled from the trends observed on our globally distributed Intelligent Platform. The latest report includes some interesting findings for those managing networks, particularly in the areas of security and IPv6 adoption.

From a security perspective, it was particularly interesting to see that port 80 (WWW/HTTP) has overtaken port 445 (Microsoft-DS) as the most targeted port for attacks, for only the third time in the report’s history. Port 80 (WWW/HTTP) took the lead in the second quarter, when its attack traffic nearly doubled to 15 percent, but interestingly it was not the most targeted port among any of the top 10 countries and regions being monitored.

In addition to the passive observations of attack traffic, our report includes insights into DDoS attacks based on reports received from our customers. During this second quarter our customers reported 270 DDoS attacks, down from 283 in the first quarter, marking the second consecutive quarter with a decline. This represents a drop of 15 percent year-over-year. This trend supports assertions from the Prolexic Q2 Global DDoS Attack Report, which suggested that volumetric attacks (those targeting Layers 1 to 4) have increased, while application attacks (those targeting Layers 5 to 7) have declined.

For the first time since Akamai began tracking repeated attacks against targets, the number of customers that suffered subsequent attacks has declined from one-in-four (26 percent) to nearly one-in-six (18 percent). Only two customers were targeted by DDoS attacks more than five times, with one customer seeing seven total attacks, as opposed to the high of seventeen attacks during the previous quarter.

In the second quarter of 2014, more than 788 million IPv4 addresses from more than 238 unique countries and regions connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform. For the first time in the history of our report, the global unique IP address count declined quarter-over-quarter, by a nominal 0.9 percent.

Though even a minimal quarter-to-quarter decline is unusual in the history of this report, we see no reason for concern. It may be due to providers working to conserve limited IPv4 address space, or as a result of increased IPv6 connectivity and adoption among leading network providers. As for IPv6 adoption, the largest number of requests continued to come from cable and mobile providers, led by Verizon Wireless with 50 percent of its requests to Akamai coming in over IPv6. Four other providers - Telenet, Brutele, Kabel Deutschland and XS4ALL - had more than one-third of their requests to Akamai take place over IPv6.

European countries continued to dominate the IPv6 adoption list, holding seven of the top 10 positions. The IPv6 traffic share more than doubled from the previous quarter in the Czech Republic, and it was up by more than a third in Belgium.

These are just a few of the areas affecting network managers in their business critical role, but it is interesting to note the changes taking place. For example, the industry is increasingly concerned with DDoS attacks, yet the approach being taken to launch attacks continues to change, making them challenging to effectively defend against. The continued adoption of IPv6 across the world is very positive for the industry, and something we expect to see continue gathering momentum.

All in all it is an exciting time to be a network manager, especially as the landscape continues to evolve and change. It will likely look very different in another five years’ time, much as how today's landscape looks very different from five years ago.