According to ESET data, ransom attacks, which were at the forefront in the first four months of 2021, increased their intensity in the ongoing period and reached the largest ransom demands ever. The attack that shut down the operations of Colonial Pipeline, the largest pipeline company in the US during this period, and the supply chain attack that exploited a vulnerability in Kaseya’s IT management software caused shockwaves not only in the cybersecurity industry but also in many other industries. In both cases, financial gain was at the forefront rather than cyberattack. The perpetrators of the Kaseya attack set a US$70 million ransom, making it the heaviest ransom demand ever known.
Password guessing attacks on the rise
Password guessing attacks, which often serve as a gateway for ransomware, increased during this period. Between May and August 2021, ESET detected 55 billion new brute-force attacks against public Remote Desktop Protocol services. This corresponds to a 104 percent increase over the previous four months’ data. ESET telemetry has also seen an impressive increase in the average number of attacks per unique client per day, from 1,392 attempts per day per machine in T1 2021 to 2,756 per day in T2 2021.
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