By Adedapo Adesanya
Hackers attacked businesses more than 22 million times last week worldwide, an expert report compiled and analyzed by Atlas Virtual Private Network (VPN), has stated.
Atlas VPN extracted and organized the data acquired from a cybersecurity giant Akamai, a firm that provides real-time data on cyberattacks that their corporate customers are under.
The cybersecurity company catches a significant amount of attacks globally since they are one of the largest distributed computing platforms in the world. They are responsible for serving between 15 to 30 percent of web traffic globally.
It was stated in the report that on average, there were 3.26 million cyberattacks daily throughout last week, out of which hackers carried most cyberattacks on Wednesday, April 15, with a total of over 3.6 million intrusion attempts.
Atlas VPN noted that most of these cyberattacks were malware attacks, which constituted 63 percent (2,070,297 malware attacks per day) of all 22 million attempts made by hackers last week.
Malware attacks steal users’ files or encrypt them and render them useless until a password is entered that will decrypt the data. Hackers then demand a ransom in order for users to retrieve the password.
According to the data analysts firm, phishing and Command & Control (C&C) attacks amounted to the remaining 37 percent. Phishing attacks and C&C attacks comprised 11 percent and 26 percent of total attacks, respectively.
Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by pretending to be a trusted figure, such as a bank employee or even your colleague.
A Command & Control (C&C) attack is when hackers attempt to take over control of a system and then steal or delete data. C&C attacks can also be used as a part of a phishing scam or a way to infect the network with malware.
During the weekend on Saturday (April 18) off, there were 12 percent fewer attacks than the average day. As a result of lesser activities during the weekend.
Compared with the previous week, (April 6-12) where the total volume of attacks was 23,807,517, hackers attacked enterprises around 1 million times less last week.
During the last 30 days, Atlas VPN explained that cybercriminals tried to infiltrate corporate networks nearly 100 million times.
This is largely due to the coronavirus pandemic which has resulted in increased internet usage with more people working from home.
It was also stated that this could be a record year for both hacker attacks and the number of records breached so far.
Aduragbemi Omiyale