Distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks grew by 50 percent in 2013 over the previous year. That’s according to a new report from cloud services provider (CSP) Akamai Technologies (AKAM). The company released its Fourth Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report, which includes data from customers across the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Researchers said Akamai customers reported 1,153 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2013.

“When a customer reports a potential distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack to us, they’re typically seeing some combination of a flood of traffic that’s significantly higher than normal along with an attempt – or attempts – to exploit vulnerabilities that may be present in a website or Web application. The distributed nature of these attacks is what can make them challenging to mitigate without dedicated resources, as the malicious traffic is originating from multiple points of origin rather than a single source,” report editor David Belson told Talkin’ Cloud.

Akamai said there was a decrease in the number of DDoS attacks reported by its customers between the second and third quarters of 2013. However, Akamai noted the number of reported DDoS attacks rose 23 percent between the third and fourth quarters. In addition, researchers found attacks originated from 188 countries or regions in the final three months of last year.

“Much of the growth in attacks reported in the fourth quarter of 2013 can be traced to the Asia Pacific region, in large part due to a series of attacks against sites in Singapore that occurred after the government there enacted an Internet licensing framework,” Akamai researchers said in the report.

Other key findings from the report included:

The complete 2014 State of the Internet Report is available for download here. Going forward, the State of the Internet Report also will include insights from DDos security provider Prolexic Technologies, which Akamai acquired in February.