OK so Beaming says UK businesses suffered, on average, 43,000 cyber-attacks in the first quarter of 2017 – each.
If this number sounds way too big, then it would be even more interesting to hear that this is actually seven per cent lower than what was going on in the same period last year.
Breaking the numbers down, Beamingsays each business gets attacked 474 times per day. Almost all of these attacks, 92 per cent of them, are targeting Internet of Things devices, such as networked security cameras or building control systems, as these IoT devices can be controlled remotely, over the internet.
Looking at IoT-related attacks specifically, the numbers are going up. Each company suffered 39,000 attacks of this nature in the first quarter of 2917, 84 per cent more compared to the same period last year.
“While it is encouraging to see that the number of cyber attacks on UK businesses has fallen, especially after the battering corporate firewalls took at the end of last year, we cannot be complacent. Businesses are still being probed hundreds of times a day by hackers and we’ve seen a threefold increase in the number of originating attackers involved in cybercrime over the last year,” says Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming.
“The vast majority of attacks are computer scripts seeking to take control of devices connected to the Internet of Things. Businesses are allowing suppliers inside their firewalls to provide access to devices such as networked printers, air conditioning units and building control systems, but the holes they are making – if not done properly – can create vulnerabilities that criminals can use too. Once inside the network, hackers can take control of company assets and use them as part of a bigger hack or distributed denial of service attack at a later stage.”
Image source: Shutterstock/alexskopje
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