Singapore among top five destinations for IoT attacks

This article was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Singapore is in the top five destinations globally for IoT attacks, the latest installment of F5 Networks’ The Hunt for IoT series shows.

The report, The Growth and Evolution of Thingbots Ensures Chaos, suggests the island nation has a sizable and vulnerable IoT deployment.

The other destinations in the top five are United States, Spain, Italy, and Hungary. However, the top 5 destinations collectively only received 27% of China’s attacks; the other 73% were globally dispersed to countries that didn’t even account for more than 1% of the total attack volume.

With 8.4 billion devices currently in use, and over 30 billion devices projected to be deployed by 2020, unprotected devices are a goldmine for hackers, as they find new ways to exploit numerous protocols beyond telnet (an underlying TCP/IP protocol for accessing remote computers) to ensure they capture as many vulnerable IoT devices as possible.

Thingbots are botnets compromising of infected IoT devices which are typically unmanaged, providing a low likelihood of being discovered by their owner and remediated.

Thingbots are capable of globally destructive attacks, and the worrying fact is that the security industry has only started discovering them with increasing frequency. Massive, well known thingbots such as Mirai and Persirai have been wreaking havoc around the world, and show no signs of slowing down.

A new variant of the notorious Mirai malware is exploiting kit with ARC processors. Dubbed the Okiru, is the first capable of infecting devices powered by ARC CPUs which is responsible for running a variety of internet-connected products including cars, mobiles, TVs, cameras and more.

In fact, despite broad awareness of their existence and threat, it is reported that Persirai infected IP cameras still exist all across Asia with the heaviest concentrations in Thailand, China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia. There is even a website that collects the streaming footage from over 73,000 hacked IP cameras worldwide. These live feeds range from parking lots and store surveillance to the bedrooms of unknown individuals.

While China, the US and Russia are clearly the top three attacking countries, the report suggests that because vulnerable IoT devices are deployed globally without bias, there is no standout IoT attack destination.

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Categories: Internet Traffic · IoT, M2M · Other Posts · Security