The region’s largest and most-connected economies are most vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service attacks, according to CenturyLink.

Some of Asia’s largest and most connected economies are fast-becoming hotspots for botnets that have been used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks across the region in 2017.

According to CenturyLink’s latest cyber threat report, China, South Korea, Japan, India and Hong Kong were the top economies in the region that hosted the most command and control (C2) servers used to amass and control botnets.

The botnets were then used to launch attacks in those places, as well as others such as United States, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Centurylink, which tracked an average of 195,000 threats per day impacting an average of 104 million unique targets due to the work of botnets, said geographies with strong or rapidly growing IT networks and infrastructure continue to be the primary source for cyber criminal activity.

“Botnets are one of the foundational tools bad actors rely on to steal sensitive data and launch DDoS attacks,” said Mike Benjamin, head of CenturyLink’s Threat Research Labs. “By analysing global botnet attack trends and methods, we’re better able to anticipate and respond to emerging threats in defence of our own network and those of our customers.”

In April 2017, a cyber crime operation led by Interpol had uncovered nearly 9,000 C2 servers in Southeast Asia that were used to compromise some 270 websites, including several government portals that could contain citizens’ personal data. The websites were infected with malware that exploited a loophole in web design applications.

“Today, almost every type of online service is at risk for cyber attacks,” said Steve Miller-Jones, senior director of product management at Limelight Networks. “At best, a DDoS attack will cause inconvenience – at worst it can bring down an entire business.”