MANILA – Attacks on work from home computers in the Philippines nearly doubled in the first six months of 2021 and are unlikely to stop any time soon given the continued remote work arrangements, a cybersecurity firm reported.
Data released by Kaspersky showed there were 4.877 million attempted attacks against users of the firm’s solutions with the remote desktop protocol (RDP) installed in the first half, up by 98.41 percent from 2.458 million in 2020.
The attacks were described as “brute-force”, which targets a device running Windows using RDP and attempts to find a valid login or password pair which would give access to the computer of the targeted host.
The cybersecurity firm said most of the desktops in the Philippines are installed with a Microsoft operating system, making the country a target for such attacks.
“The hurried mass transition to home working has given cyber attackers this logical conclusion that poorly configured RDP servers would surge and then we saw the number of attacks shoot up tremendously,” according to its general manager for Southeast Asia, Yeo Siang Tiong.
“Now that remote work is projected to be the next step as the future of business evolves, it would be to every company’s advantage to pay attention to establishing and improving their cybersecurity policies,” he added.
Most of the Philippines has remained under quarantine since March 2020, with a significant number of businesses operating on a work-from-home basis.
Data from Kaspersky noted that while the first-half figures surged from the same period in 2020, fewer attacks were reported since March.
“Attacks on remote-access infrastructure, including collaboration tools, are unlikely to stop any time soon so, we call on businesses and employees to look into securing their work-from-home set-up better,” said Tiong.
The Philippines was ranked the sixth country in terms of the online threats detected in 2020, with 44.410 million different internet-borne threats.(GMA News)
