07 June 2017
Of the IoT attacks detected in 2016, two thirds were attempting to discover specific devices.
Cyber attacks on governments around the world doubled in 2016, increasing from seven per cent in 2015 to 14 per cent.
Attacks on the finance sector also rose from just three per cent in 2015 to four per cent of all attacks in 2016.
The manufacturing sector came in at third place at 13 per cent, while the retail sector, which topped the list of all cyber security attacks on all sectors in 2015, moved down into fourth place (11 per cent).
Those are the findings from NTT Security’s latest Global Threat Intelligence Report. It was compiled from network data collected from 10,000 clients worldwide, 3.5 trillion security logs, 6.2 billion attempted attacks, together with ‘honeypot’ traps and sandboxes in more than 100 countries.
Of attacks targeting EMEA, France and the UK accounted for the most at 11 and 10 per cent, respectively. NTT says three industries in the region were targeted in 54 per cent of all cases: finance (20 per cent), manufacturing (17 per cent), and retail (17 per cent).
The study also reveals that 63 per cent of all worldwide attacks originated from IP addresses in the US, followed by the UK (four per cent), and China (three per cent). NTT says the US is the main location of cloud-hosted infrastructure globally, and hackers often utilise public cloud to orchestrate attacks due to the low cost and stability of the infrastructure.
Of the IoT attacks detected in 2016, two thirds were attempting to discover specific devices such as a particular model of video camera, three per cent were seeking a web server or other type of server, while two per cent were attempting to attack a database. n
