Cyberattacks On IOT Devices Surge 300% In 2019, ‘Measured In Billions’, Report Claims

#News(Security) [ via IoTGroup ]

Security researchers from F-Secure have issued a stark warning that cyberattacks on IoT devices are now accelerating at an unprecedented rate.
The company’s “Attack Landscape H1 2019” measured a three-fold increase in attack traffic to more than 2.9 billion events.
The company uses honeypots—decoy servers around the world disguised as everyday operational hardware to attract everyday attacks—and this is the first time that attacks on those honeypots “has ever hit the billion mark.”
The researchers put this increase in attacks down to the increase in the numbers of IoT devices being deployed around the world.
In recent months, we have seen multiple warnings on the vulnerability of such devices to attack.
Often IT departments are not even aware of all these devices on their networks, making the task of patching security issues near impossible.
Again, sometimes it is an attack on the device itself—remember that this includes medical and control devices which contain valuable data in themselves.
Attacking an unpatched printer or VOIP phone to access a seemingly secure network is clever and dangerous.
The Telnet protocol attracted “the largest share of attack traffic—760 million events,” up almost 30% since the last report.
Given this IoT focus, it was no surprise then, the researchers explained, “that malware found in the honeypots was dominated by various versions of Mirai, which infects IoT devices that use default credentials and co-opts those devices into botnets that conduct DDoS attacks.”
“but there’s also no doubt that attack traffic is also simply on the increase.” The researchers cited IoT growth as well as the continuing “prevalence of Eternal Blue” for this.
Unsurprisingly, the team also concluded that “99.9% of traffic to our honeypots is automated,” meaning bots and scripts and malware designed to attack at scale.
Retire old assets that aren’t necessary.

Read More..
AutoTextExtraction by Working BoT using SmartNews 1.0268203417 Build 26 Aug 2019