Hackers continue targeting remote employees in India, 36mn attacks reported till Nov

As millions of us around the world get familiar with work from home environment, the number of cybercriminal threats have increased by several times. According to Kaspersky researchers, there was a 242% growth in brute force attacks on Remote Desktop Protocols or RDP as compared to last year. Also, 1.7 million unique malicious files were disguised as apps for corporate communication.

As per the report some 3.3 billion attacks on Remote Desktop Protocols were made between January and November 2020. During the same time last year Kaspersky detected 969 million of these attacks, worldwide. 

As for India, the number of detections in this country went as high as 36 million in 2020 between January to November. The number of attacks in the same period last year was around 18 million.

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According to the researchers, employees working from home in such as short space of time, opened up new vulnerabilities that cybercriminals were quick to target.

This is mainly because the volume of corporate traffic grew, users moved to third party services to exchange data and potentially insecure Wi Fi networks as well. It is said that one of the most popular application-level protocols for accessing windows workstations was Microsoft's proprietary protocol RDP. In addition, the computers that were made available to remote workers and were incorrectly configured, grew in number.

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Researchers say that these attacks were attempting to brute force (systematically trying to find the correct option) username and password for RDP. And when the hacker is successful, it resulted in them getting remote access to the target computer.

In addition, some cybercriminals were able to figure out that several workers replaced offline communication with online tools. So, these were a target for them as well. Researchers say that 1.66 million unique malicious files were spread under the guise of popular messenger and online conference applications that are used for work. Installing these would load adware programs, flooding victims devices with unwanted advertising and gathering personal data for third party use.