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December 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
The pandemic causes a spike in cyberattacks on Russian companies
A recent study by the local telcoms giant Rostelecom has revealed that the number
or attacks on Russian companies has doubled since the beginning of 2020 as hackers mostly attempted to intercept top managers' email or take over control of companies' key infrastructure.
Rostelecom's division in charge of cyberattack monitoring, Solar JSOC, has reported over 200 professionally executed cyberattacks targeting Russian companies in the January to November period of 2020, which is twice as much as for the entire year 2019.
Most often, attackers targeted strategically important companies, such as banks and firms
in the areas of nuclear power, electricity, defence, healthcare and state governance. Solar JSOC wouldn't reveal any names of specific companies that have suffered cyberattacks.
According to the research firm, in the lion's
share of cases, attackers tried to exploit so
called zero-day vulnerabilities – that is software vulnerabilities that are unknown to the developers and users. Of all the registered attacks, zero-day vulnerabilities played a role in 85% of cases.
Another type of attack involved attempts to intercept control of critical infrastructure by targeting work stations of IT administrators with high-level access privileges.
The high security level of a company's IT infrastructure can't guarantee that hackers won't be able to get access to it, Solar JSOC's general director Vladimir Drukov said in comments to the report.
"More and more often, hackers choose not to attack a company directly, but target its subcontractors instead, which are generally less concerned about cybersecurity issues but have access to the infrastructure of the target company," he explained.
Incidentally, a sizeable proportion of cyberattacks directed at Russian companies comes from abroad, local cybersecurity firms say.
According to the company Check Point, between May and October, hackers based in the United States accounted for 36% of all cyberattacks against Russian companies, while only 29% came from inside Russia.
Meanwhile, one of the main reasons for the spike in cyberattacks observed this year is the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which caused many companies to fully or partially switch to remote work. As a result, many employees have been accessing companies' IT infrastructures from home and other places more vulnerable against cyberattacks.
"Cybercriminals' activity has stepped up by 20
to 25% since the beginning of the pandemic," Yevgeny Kaspersky, general director of Kaspersky Lab, was quoted as saying by TASS. "And this
is good news for companies working in the cybersecurity area. We have a lot of work." According to Pavel Korostylev, head of the
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