Cyber attacks on UK businesses surge over summer to reach new record highs
New analysis from Beaming, the business ISP, reveals that the level of cyber attack activity on UK businesses continued to surge over the summer, with firms experiencing 157,528 attacks each on average between July and September. This was an increase of 243% on the same period last year when businesses were attacked online 45,970 times each.
The rate of commercial cyber attacks has increased every quarter since the start of 2018 and remains at the highest level since Beaming started monitoring attacks in 2016. Businesses were attacked online more than once every minute over the summer, with attempts to infiltrate their systems peaking at 1,778 per day in July.
Beaming’s cyber security analysts identified almost half a million unique IP addresses used to launch online cyber attacks on UK businesses this summer. The level of attacks originating from IP addresses in China more than doubled and there was also a large number of attacks originating in Taiwan, Brazil and Russia.
20% of the cyber attacks recorded by Beaming targeted IoT devices that could be remotely controlled over the internet. Six percent of attacks sought to infiltrate file sharing services.
Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming, comments: “Previous summers have been relatively quiet when it comes to cybercrime, but the hackers haven’t taken a break this year. Throughout 2019 we have witnessed new highs in the volume of cyber attacks hitting organisations in the UK and also the number of active agents behind those attempts.”
“We are tackling more and more malicious code at a network level to minimise the threat of online attacks to our customers. The hackers are after the weakest link they can find, so companies need to boost their resilience to these sustained, indiscriminate attacks. They can do this by ensuring their software and cyber security defences are up-to-date, putting in place measures such as managed firewalls and educating employees to help them avoid the main risks they could be exposed to.”