15 May 2018
The volume of internet-borne cyber attacks on UK businesses originating from European locations doubled in March.
Hastings-based ISP Beaming identified 8,983 attacks for the month which it says is much more than the 4,469 seen in February and 3,365 in January.
According to the company, the attacks represented 44 per cent of all cyber assaults on UK businesses, and made Europe the prime source of attacks for the first time.
More than a third (35 per cent) of the attacks in March originated from locations in the Czech Republic while a further 12 per cent were said to be from Russian sources.
Beaming says the first quarter of 2018 was the busiest start to a year for cyber attacks on UK businesses since it began analysing threats in 2016.
It says companies were subjected to 53,981 individual cyber attacks during the first three months of the year, approximately 600 a day, compared to 474 attempts a day each in 1Q17.
Eleven per cent of attacks sought to compromise databases, while 54 per cent targeted IoT connected devices such as building control systems and networked security cameras.
Beaming believeshackers target these devices to help launch DDoS attacks at a later stage.
Over the last two years, Beaming says it has analysed cyber attacks in real-time targeting thousands of UK-based businesses to better understand their nature and origin. The ISP then uses the results of its analysis to help organisations improve their security.
“We’ve witnessed an unusually high level of cyber attack activity originating from Europe since the start of March, and this continued into the beginning of April,” says Sonia Blizzard, MD, Beaming.
“Company firewalls and IT security systems are under constant pressure from malicious computer scripts and we’ve had to constantly update our network-level protections to keep up with new and evolving threats.”