Reconnaissance attacks on IoT and OT installations showed a significant rise last week. This means:
- IoT and OT cybersecurity posture adopted by some of the targeted companies is not helping
- Hackers are penetrating critical networks by exploiting existing and latent vulnerabilities
- Many of these attacks are slipping below the cybersecurity radar as most of the attacks are following a pattern that has remained unchanged since January 2021
- In terms of the volume of such attacks logged by us, it is quite possible that some of these reconnaissance attacks have succeeded in exfiltrating data or in deploying ransomware in the targeted systems
Manufacturing and utilities seem to be the most affected sectors. The relentless and unceasing waves of sophisticated attacks that we have been logging in our honeypots globally continue at an ever-accelerating pace globally.
In terms of countries, cyberattacks on India, the US, UK, and Australia saw a significant rise last week. There seems to be a coordinated effort in attacking various sectors in these countries using large-scale botnets which include hijacked mobile devices. These devices are used to route attacks to mask their origin and also to launch large-scale DDoS attacks.
Weekly advisory
Entities belonging to these segments should be on their guard in the coming week:
- Manufacturing
- Healthcare
- Government websites and agencies – especially lawmakers and government agencies connected with internal/homeland security
- Manufacturing plants and maritime agencies
- Defense establishments
- Utility entities
- Financial services
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