With do business from home rising in popularity amid the pandemic, cyberattacks against remote access protocols have continued to rise over the previous yr, mentioned a brand new report.
After the change to remote work, brute-force assaults against RDP — which is maybe the preferred remote desktop protocol and is used to access Windows or servers — skyrocketed, reaching a brand new excessive of 409 million worldwide in November 2020, confirmed the analysis from cybersecurity agency Kaspersky.
In a brute-force assault, attackers take a look at totally different usernames and passwords till the proper mixture is discovered — they usually achieve access to the company sources.
When the world went into lockdown in March 2020, the whole variety of brute-force assaults against RDP jumped from 93.1 million worldwide in February 2020 to 277.4 million 2020 in March — a 197 p.c improve, based on Kaspersky’s telemetry.
The numbers in India went from 1.3 million in February 2020 to three.3 million in March 2020. From April 2020 onward, month-to-month assaults by no means dipped beneath 300 million, they usually reached a brand new excessive of 409 million assaults worldwide in November 2020.
The highest variety of assaults, 4.5 million in India, was recorded in July 2020, confirmed the information.
In February 2021 — practically one yr from the beginning of the pandemic — there have been 377.5 million brute-force assaults — a far cry from the 93.1 million witnessed originally of 2020.
India alone witnessed 9.04 million assaults in February 2021.
The complete variety of assaults in India from February-December 2020 was round 37 million, whereas the whole variety of assaults recorded in India throughout January and February 2021 are round 15 million.
“Remote work isn’t going anywhere. Even as companies begin considering re-opening their workplaces, many have stated that they will continue to include remote work in their operating model or pursue a hybrid format,” Dmitry Galov, safety skilled at Kaspersky, mentioned in a press release.
“That means it’s likely these types of attacks against remote desktop protocols will continue to occur at a rather high rate. 2020 made it clear that companies need to update their security infrastructure, and a good place to start is providing stronger protection for their RDP access.”
Enabling access to RDP by means of a company VPN and enabling use of Network Level Authentication (NLA) when connecting remotely are among the many suggestions that consultants supplied to maintain organisations secure from brute-force assaults.
