The Insecurity of the IoT is Only Getting More Profound, Says Principal Researcher at F-Secure

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The Insecurity of the IoT is Only Getting More Profound, Says Principal Researcher at F-Secure

By CircleID Reporter
September 15, 2019, 9:23 pm PDT Views: 11,623 Add Comment

“Three years after Mirai first appeared, and two years after WannaCry, it shows that we still haven’t solved the problems leveraged in those outbreaks,” said F-Secure Principal Researcher Jarno Niemela. “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 co-opted into botnets. And the activity on SMB indicates there are still too many machines out there that remain unpatched.” According to the new report, Attack Landscape H1 2019, detailing traffic measured by F-Secure’s global network of honeypots, the number of attack events measured from January through June was twelve times higher when compared with the same period in 2018—an increase primarily driven by IoT-related traffic.

— Where are these attacks taking place? “Populating the top ten list of attack source countries for H1 2019 are, as usual, the US, Russia, Germany and China. However, this is the first time that traffic volumes from the Chinese IP space has overshadowed other countries to take top spot.”

— Mirai malware still going strong. “Malware found in the honeypots is dominated by various versions of Mirai, which is still going strong three years after it first burst onto the scene in 2016. Mirai targets IoT devices such as IP cameras and routers, infects those using default credentials, and co-opts them into botnet armies.”

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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