Beware! Work From Home Employees In India Attacked 3.6 Crore Times By Hackers, 242% Rise In Cyber Attack

With workstations already shifted to online platforms and work from home becoming the flavour of the season, the number of cybercrime activities conducted this year, from the period between January to November, have shown a 242% spur, compared to the numbers recorded in 2019.

With whole companies largely conducting their operations on online platforms for getting work done, in-office and corporate communications, phishers and hackers have upped their games and come up with different sophisticated means of hacking and conducting brute force attacks on such platforms, at an increased level.

Let’s learn more about this.

Over 300 Crore Cyber Attacks Recorded In 2020

Researchers from Kaspersky have found out that the number of brute force attacks on Remote Desktop Protocols (RDP) increased by 242% this year, as compared to the last.

A brute-force attack consists of an attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing a combination correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found. 

The report also depicted that there were nearly 330 crore attacks made on Remote Desktop Protocols between January and November in 2020, as compared to 96.9 crore such attacks recorded in 2019, all around the globe.

In India, the number of RDP attacks detected went up from 1.8 crore in 2019 to 3.6 crore in 2020, from January to November, which is almost double. 

Cybercriminals Using Online Conference Tools for Hacking

The researchers at Kaspersky believe that due to such a swift transition for employees and organizations to online platforms, new vulnerabilities have opened up for cybercriminals, which they targeted and exploited quickly.

Offline communications have been largely replaced by online tools.

This became an easy target for online phishers. 

Researchers have found that nearly 17 lakh unique malicious files were spread, disguised as apps for corporate communication, including popular messenger and online conference applications.

As soon as such apps were installed, they would load adware programs, flooding the target’s device with unwanted advertising and gathering personal data for third party use.

Remote Devices Largely Hacked

As corporate traffic grew, users migrated to third party service providers for exchanging data.

Also, Microsoft’s proprietary protocol RDP became among the highly used application-level protocols for accessing windows.

Simultaneously, incorrectly configured computers made available to remote workers grew in number.

According to researchers, this was done to brute force username and password for RDP. Once successful, the hacker managed to get remote access to the target computer.