Kaspersky Lab has published a report on information security trends in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). The research shows that this area continues to attract the attention of cybercriminals, who are increasingly interested in vulnerable devices.
It is reported that in the first six months of 2019, using special Honeypot servers posing as IoT devices (such as smart TVs, webcams, and routers), company specialists recorded over 105 million attacks on Internet of Things devices from 276,000 unique IP addresses. This is approximately nine times more than in the same period in 2018, when about 12 million attacks were recorded from 69,000 IP addresses.
Research indicates that the most frequently hacked and infected Internet of Things devices are used by cybercriminals to orchestrate large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Compromised IoT devices are also employed by attackers as proxy servers for carrying out other types of malicious activities.
According to Experts state that the main problems with the Internet of Things are easily guessable passwords (often they have factory default passwords that are publicly available) and outdated device firmware. In the best cases, updates are released with significant delays; in the worst cases, they are never released at all (sometimes the potential for updates is not even technically provided). As a result, many IoT devices are hacked using trivial methods, such as vulnerabilities in the web interface. Almost all such vulnerabilities are critical, but the manufacturer has extremely limited capabilities for quickly creating a patch and delivering it in the form of an update.
More details on the analytical study results by Kaspersky Lab can be found on the website .
Source: 3dnews.ru
