Kaspersky claims that China has become the largest sources of IoT attack infections

Recently, Kaspersky reported that the frequency of attacks against IoT devices is increasing rapidly. In the first half of 2019, Kaspersky’s network of honeypots observed 105 million attacks on IoT devices coming from 276,000 unique IP addresses in the first six months of the year. In contrast, there were only 12 million attacks in the first half of 2018.
In general, until the victim device becomes a member of the botnet, the victim hardly notices that his device has been compromised. Experts say Mirai and its variants remain the most common malware in IoT attacks, accounting for 39% of all infections. There are many ways to infect IoT devices, including brute-forcing to crack device passwords, exploit unrepaired vulnerabilities found in various devices, and so on.

Kaspersky pointed out that the top three source countries for IoT attacks are China (30%), Brazil (19%) and Egypt (12%). In the same period of 2018, Brazil was the largest source of the attack, accounting for 28% of all cases.

“As people become more and more surrounded by smart devices, we are witnessing how IoT attacks are intensifying. Judging by the enlarged number of attacks and criminals’ persistency, we can say that IoT is a fruitful area for attackers that use even the most primitive methods, like guessing password and login combinations. This is much easier than most people think: the most common combinations by far are usually “support/support”, followed by “admin/admin”, “default/default”. It’s quite easy to change the default password, so we urge everyone to take this simple step towards securing your smart devices” – said Dan Demeter, a security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.