KUALA LUMPUR, April 17 — Malaysia saw a six per cent quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q) increase in the overall internet traffic during the first quarter of 2024 (1Q2024), compared with 4Q2023, according to connectivity cloud company Cloudflare.

In its quarterly report, titled Global Internet Trends and Insight, Cloudflare revealed that the mitigated traffic originating from Malaysia during the period grew by 19 per cent.

"In 1Q2024, Cloudflare served an average of 23 billion daily content requests to Malaysia.

"Of those daily requests, an average of 929 million or four per cent were blocked as cyber-attacks each day, primarily classified as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks originating in Malaysia, a 19 per cent increase q-o-q,” Cloudflare said.

Sharing further information on DDoS, Cloudflare said the most targeted industries in Malaysia during 1Q2024 include gaming/gambling, cryptocurrency, information technology and services as well as airlines/aviation.

The company said the main defences against application layer attacks were web application firewall (WAF) rules and DDoS mitigations, each accounting for 48 per cent.

"Looking at WAF rules, the most commonly used mitigation categories included the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) anomaly (31 per cent), structured query language injection (SQLi) (25 per cent), and file inclusion (18 per cent),” it explained.

Regionally, Cloudflare said Singapore’s internet traffic increased by 18 per cent q-o-q in 1Q2024, while its mitigated traffic grew 55 per cent.

The company said it blocked an average of six billion cyber threats per day targeting Singapore, a 24 per cent decrease q-o-q.

"The most targeted industries in Singapore during 1Q2024 include cryptocurrency; computer software, gaming/gambling and banking, financial services and insurance,” it said.

As for Thailand, the report showed that the internet traffic in the country increased by 16 per cent q-o-q and the domestic mitigated traffic grew by 30 per cent q-o-q.

Cloudflare stopped around two billion cyber threats every day targeting Thailand, showing a nine per cent increase compared with the previous quarter.

It also noted that the targeted industries were the same as those in Singapore.

Meanwhile, the Philippines saw its internet traffic go up by eight per cent q-o-q in 1Q2024 with the mitigated traffic from the country increasing by 26 per cent in the same period.

Cloudflare said the company has blocked five billion cyber threats per day targeting the Philippines showing a 22 per cent increase compared with the previous quarter.

Additionally, it noted that an increase of 10 per cent q-o-q in overall internet traffic happened in Indonesia during 1Q2024, while mitigated traffic originating from the nation grew 20 per cent.

"Cloudflare blocked an average of two billion cyber threats per day targeting Indonesia, a nine per cent decrease q-o-q” it added. — Bernama