INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
During the first half of 2019, cybercriminals increased the intensity of both IoT and SMB-related attacks according to a new report from
well as the continued popularity of Eternal Blue and similar exploits two years after the WannaCry ransomware was released on the
world.F-Secure uses decoy servers called honeypots to lure in attackers to collect information on their activities and this year its
honeypots measured a twelvefold increase in IoT and SMB-related attacks compared to the same period a year ago
This increase was driven by traffic targeting the Telnet and UPnP protocols, which are used by IoT devices, as well as the SMB protocol,
which is used by the Eternal family of exploits to spread ransomware and banking Trojans.The largest share of traffic during H1 2019 was led
by Telnet with over 760m attack events logged or around 26 percent of traffic
UPnP was the next most frequent with 611m attacks followed by SSH, which is also used to target IoT devices, at 456m attacks.IoT devices
that have been infected with malware such as Mirai are likely sources of this traffic as Mirai was the most common malware family observed
Mirai targets and infects routers, security cameras and other IoT devices which use factory default credentials.F-Secure also found that
traffic to SMB port 445 accounted for 556m attacks
The high level of SMB traffic indicates that the Eternal family of exploits, which were first used in 2017's WannaCry ransomware outbreak,
are still being used by cybercriminals looking to target millions of machines that have not yet been patched.Principal researcher at
The insecurity of the IoT, for one, is only getting more profound, with more and more devices cropping up all the time and then being
