Cybercriminals strike with lightning speed
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
In an experiment, British software developer Sophos has tested how quickly and how often hackers strike worldwide: The first attack on a honeypot cloud server hit after less than a minute.
In its experiment, Sophos set up ten honeypot cloud servers around the world, to accurately detect and analyze cyber attacks. The results were alarming: Over 30 days, the security experts recorded more than five million attacks. In São Paulo, there were just 52 seconds between the server going live and the first attacks; around the world, the servers fell victim to a new attack every four to five seconds. For the majority of login attempts, attackers used default usernames and popular, weak passwords. 123456 was the top number sequence used as a login password attempt.
Many experts believe that when it comes to digitalization, security poses one of the biggest challenges – and this applies to both cloud services and the Internet of Things (IoT). As a study by Thycotic has found, company managers have not yet fully recognized the problem. In the study, IT decision-makers complained that their CEOs see their security-related work only in terms of cost and overlook the business benefits of investments in security.