"The most likely explanation for this behavior is the fact that Asia continues to see increased penetration of high-speed internet connectivity," the report said. "At the same time, the use of unpatched and pirated copies of Microsoft Windows is known to be prevalent within the Asia Pacific region."

Computers that lack up-to-date patches are more easily infected by malicious software, which can link the computer to other infected machines as part of a botnet that can be used for DDOS attacks.

To put in perspective the overall rise in DDOS traffic, Prolexic said it mitigated 9.5 petabytes of data for the first quarter of 2012, the same amount it handled during the whole of 2011. A petabyte is equal to 1,000 terabytes.