Cyberattacks against remote access protocols rise amid Covid

New Delhi:  With work from home becoming more popular amid the pandemic, cyberattacks against remote access protocols have continued to rise over the past year, said a new report.
After the switch to remote work, brute-force attacks against RDP — which is perhaps the most popular remote desktop protocol and is used to access Windows or servers — skyrocketed, reaching a new high of 409 million worldwide in November 2020, showed the research from cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.
In a brute-force attack, attackers test different usernames and passwords until the correct combination is found — and they gain access to the corporate resources.
When the world went into lockdown in March 2020, the total number of brute-force attacks against RDP jumped from 93.1 million worldwide in February 2020 to 277.4 million 2020 in March — a 197 per cent increase, according to Kaspersky’s telemetry.
The numbers in India went from 1.3 million in February 2020 to 3.3 million in March 2020. From April 2020 onward, monthly attacks never dipped below 300 million, and they reached a new high of 409 million attacks worldwide in November 2020.
The highest number of attacks, 4.5 million in India, was recorded in July 2020, showed the data.