“As companies return to a hybrid workplace, it’s crucial that they are aware of the evolving threat landscape,” said Craig Robinson, Program Director, Security Services at IDC. “The data highlighted in this threat report by Nuspire and Recorded Future shows that security leaders need to stay vigilant as threat actors see opportunity in the continued era of remote access.”
Increase in VPN attacks
In Q1 2021, there was a 1,916% increase in attacks against Fortinet’s SSL-VPN and a 1,527% increase in Pulse Connect Secure VPN. These vulnerabilities allow a threat actor to gain access to a network. Once they are in, they can exfiltrate information and deploy ransomware.
“2020 was the era of remote work and as the workforce adjusted, information technology professionals scrambled to support this level of remote activity by enabling a wide variety of remote connectivity methods,” said J.R. Cunningham, CSO at Nuspire. “This added multiple new attack vectors that enabled threat actors to prey on organizations, which is what we started to see in Q1 and are continuing to see today.”
Because of the significant increase in VPN and RDP vulnerabilities, the report discovers malware, botnet and exploitation activity are down compared to Q4, but threat actors are still on the prowl.
Additional findings
Network Security, Firewalls, and VPNs with Cloud Labs