USA and China identified as top cyber attack sources

NSFOCUS released its H1 Cybersecurity Insights report, which analyzed traffic from January 1, 2018 to June 30, 2018.

Crypto miners

Since the end of March, the number of crypto mining activities has risen sharply compared to the beginning of 2018. Among all crypto miners, WannaMine was the most active, responsible for more than 70 percent of all detected crypto mining activities detected by NSFOCUS.

Recidivist attackers

Among more than 27 million attack sources detected in the first half of 2018, 25 percent were responsible for 40 percent of attack events. This implies that “recidivists” (attack sources found to be repeatedly linked with malicious behaviors) are more threatening than other attack sources.

The large proportion of recidivists indicates that it is a common practice among attackers to reuse attack resources. China, the USA, and Russia are home to the most “recidivists.”

Government agencies, energy, education, and finance sectors are most favored targets, suffering 90 percent of recidivist attacks, due to the large volume of business, extensive distribution, and more sensitive data.

IoT impact on attack types

During the first six months of 2018, there were fewer new Trojan variants than botnets and worms. This is linked with the proliferation of networked hosts and IoT devices in part due to the reduction of hardware costs. Due to the high activity of backdoor programs, device and network administrators need to upgrade devices and check their configurations regularly.

Backdoor activity remained at high levels and then peaked in May at 6,000,000 before falling to more nominal levels. Backdoors are common malicious programs that can provide remote control access solely through default login interfaces of IoT devices.

DDoS traffic

DDoS attack traffic drops sharply when the government exercises security governance during substantial events both physical and cyber. In the first half of 2018, the amount of DDoS traffic seen in the network environments in China is somewhat suppressed due to the government’s traffic governance for major events.

61 percent of DDoS attack sources have launched only DDoS attacks over a long period of time. Common DDoS attack resources include reflectors and controlled hosts or devices, whose IP addresses or IP address ranges are relatively fixed. However, about 9 percent of DDoS attack sources launch exploit attacks later.

“Looking ahead to the rest of 2018, vulnerabilities will continue to be discovered each and every day and the need to exploit those found will always be present. We’ve noticed that attackers prefer to reuse tactics and exploits, so patching regularly is critical for IT professionals,” said Guy Rosefelt, Director, Threat Intelligence & Web Security, NSFOCUS. “We also believe DDoS traffic will remain a great scourge on the Internet. Arguably, most hackers are capable of causing enormous amounts of traffic and their capability is increasing, which will continue to be a great challenge to defenders and security governance personnel.”