Cybersecurity company Kaspersky Telemetry showed that both brute force attacks on databases and web attacks grew by nearly a quarter a day in the first trimester of 2020, while most users worked at home
From an information security standpoint, an employee within the office network and an employee connecting to the same network from home are two completely different users.
This view seems to be shared by cyber criminals as the number of attacks on servers and remote access tools has increased as their use has increased, with the average daily number of brute force attacks on database servers rising by 23 percent from January in April 2020.
Moreover, as of January 2020, the average number of web attacks blocked by Kaspersky Web threat detection technologies increased by a staggering 25 per cent. Most of the threats grew more or less proportionally; however, the majority of blocked web attacks originated from resources that redirected users to phishing websites.
In addition, the researchers also detected an increase in modifications to the Trojan-PSW browser script, which are used to steal credentials entered by users while shopping online and then transfer them to cyber criminals. Websites capable of silently installing cookie files on computers of users and resources that injected advertising scripts into the traffic of users represented a significant share of the web threats.
Denis Parinov, a Kaspersky security researcher, said, “Usually when we monitor changes in activities of specific threats, we think it’s far-fetched to associate them with concurrent world events unless they have a direct relation to the cyberthreats. However, this case is different, as users’ behaviour has changed worldwide.
Undoubtedly, all changes in activity cannot be entirely tied to users staying home with absolute certainly – there are always other unaccounted factors in the equation – but the trend certainly shows that staying home has affected both users and cybercriminals. We advise users to remain cautious and use a reliable security solution to protect themselves from online threats.”
