Kaspersky Lab has published a report on information security trends in the Internet of Things (Internet of Things, IoT). Studies have shown that this area continues to be the focus of cybercriminals, who are showing increasing interest in vulnerable devices.
It is reported that in the first six months of 2019, with the help of special Honeypots decoy servers posing as IoT devices (such as smart TVs, webcams and routers), the company's specialists managed to record more than 105 million attacks on IoT devices from 276 thousand unique IP addresses. This is about nine times more than in the same period in 2018: then about 12 million attacks were recorded from 69 IP addresses.
Studies show that most often hacked and infected IoT devices are used by cybercriminals to organize large-scale attacks aimed at denial of service (Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS). Also, compromised IoT devices are used by attackers as proxy servers for other types of malicious actions.
On According to experts, the main problems of the Internet of Things are easy-to-guess passwords (very often they have pre-installed factory passwords that are in the public domain) and outdated device firmware. At the same time, at best, updates are released with significant delays, at worst, they are not released at all (sometimes the possibility of an update is not even technically provided). As a result, many IoT devices are hacked using trivial means such as vulnerabilities in the web interface. Almost all such vulnerabilities are critical, but the manufacturer has extremely limited ability to quickly create a patch and deliver it as an update.
More information about the results of the analytical study by Kaspersky Lab can be found on the website .
Source: 3dnews.ru