Bengaluru, Aug 23 (IANS): India ranks eighth among countries most frequently targeted for web application attacks and stands fifth on the list of source countries, with close to 12 million attacks sourced from the country, a new report said on Wednesday.

According to a report by Cloud delivery firm Akamai, there has been a 28 per cent year-over-year (YoY) increase in total Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks globally in the second quarter of 2017.

The rise, which was followed after three quarters of decline, was mainly attributed to 'PBot' malware which emerged as the foundation for the strongest DDoS attacks.

"Events like the 'Mirai botnet', the exploitation used by 'WannaCry' and 'Petya', the continued rise of 'SQLi' attacks and the re-emergence of 'PBot' all illustrate how attackers will not only migrate to new tools but also return to old tools that have previously proven highly effective," said Martin McKeay, Senior Security Advocate at Akamai, in a statement.

Egypt was found to be the source of maximum number of attacks with unique IP addresses, contributing 32 per cent globally, the report titled 'Q2 2017 State of the Internet/Security Report' stated.

Though the frequency of DDoS attacks increased, the number of IP addresses involved in volumetric DDoS attacks dropped 98 per cent from 595,000 to 11,000 indicating the use of fewer devices to launch such attacks.

One gaming company was attacked 558 times which is approximately six times a day on average, the report said.