Stefan Mileschin

Remote workers are the soft targets

Hackers are taking advantage of the global destabilisation by targeting essential industries and common vulnerabilities from the shift to remote working, according to a new report from NTT.

The outfit's 2021 Global Threat Intelligence Report (GTIR) said that manufacturing, healthcare and finance industries all saw an increase in attacks globally (300, 200 and 53 percent respectively). These top three sectors accounting for a combined total of 62 percent of all attacks in 2020, up 11 percent from 2019. In the UK and Ireland, manufacturing was the most targeted industry, accounting for 80 percent of all attacks in 2020 - well above the global average of 22 percent - followed by the finance sector at 18 percent.

As organisations race to offer more virtual, remote access through the use of client portals, application-specific and web-application attacks spiked, accounting for 90 percent of all attacks in the UK and Ireland. This number was 23 percent higher than the global average (67 percent) and the highest rate of combined web attacks of any country analysed. Manufacturing bore the brunt of these attacks in the UK and Ireland, with 93 percent of all hostile activity targeted at the industry being web-application or application-specific attacks.

https://fudzilla.com/news/52844-hack...ial-industries