Singapore – More than 61 million bruteforce attacks are targeting businesses in Southeast Asia in 2023, according to the latest report by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.
Data from the report revealed that a total of 61,374,948 Bruteforce.Generic.RDP.* were detected and foiled from the period of January to December last year. This was done through Kaspersky’s B2B products installed in companies of various sizes in the region.
Last year, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand reported the highest number of RDP attacks. In contrast, Singapore experienced over six million incidents, the Philippines nearly five million, and Malaysia had the lowest number, with nearly three million brute-force attempts.
In this context, a brute force attack pertains to a method for guessing a password or an encryption key by systematically trying all possible combinations of characters until the correct one is found. A successful brute force attack enables an attacker to obtain valid user credentials.
Meanwhile, a Bruteforce.Generic.RDP.* attack aims to discover a valid RDP login/password pair by systematically testing all possible passwords until the correct one is found. A successful attack grants the attacker remote access to the targeted host computer.
Adrian Hia, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Kaspersky, said, “Bruteforce attacks is not a threat companies should ignore. The use of third-party services for data exchange, employees working on home computers and potentially insecure Wi-Fi networks, and the use of remote-access tools like RDP remain to be a headache for corporate infosec teams.”
“We cannot discount that artificial intelligence modules and algorithms can be used to break corporate log-in and password pairs faster. And once threat actors gain remote access to your corporate computers, the possibility of financial and even reputational damage they can do becomes endless. Businesses here should beef up their endpoint and network security posture to defend themselves against smarter AI-based Bruteforce attacks,” he added.
Following this report, companies are also urged to ensure all possible protection measures, including the use of strong passwords, making RDP available only through VPN, the use of network-level authentication, the use of two-factor authentication, and a reliable security solution.
