Over 100 Million Attacks Were Detected on IoT Devices in H1 2019

• Such attacks have increased by nine times than the numbers (about 12 million) recorded in H1 2018.
• Mirai-like botnet attacks accounted for 39% of the total attacks recorded.

Attacks against IoT endpoints have surged in the first half of 2019, highlighting the continued threat to unsecured connected devices.

What is the count?

Kaspersky’s honeypots detected 105 million attacks on IoT devices from 276,000 unique IP addresses in the first half of 2019. Such attacks have increased by nine times than the numbers (about 12 million) recorded in H1 2018.

Top botnets

• Mirai-like botnet attacks accounted for 39% of the total attacks recorded. This means that these botnets usually exploit old and unpatched vulnerabilities in order to slip through the IoT devices.
• Another malware family named Nyadrop was sent in 38.75% of attacks. It is distributed via brute-forcing attacks and often serves as a Mirai downloader.
• Apart from these, Gafgyt was used in 2.12% of attacks. It also uses brute-forcing attacks to take over devices.

Major impacted regions

• Devices in China were most affected by attacks. It accounted for 30% of total infection in the first half of the year.
• Brazil followed by Egypt saw 19% and 12% of the total IoT attacks.

Recommendations

• Install updates for the firmware as soon as they are available.
• Periodically change the passwords and replace them with complicated ones that include capital and lower case letters.
• Keep access to IoT devices restricted by a local VPN. This allows you to access your devices from your ‘home’ network instead of publicly exposing them on the internet.