Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky recently announced that it had trounced over 47 million incidents of remote desktop protocol (RDP) cyberattacks in Southeast Asia from January to June alone this year.
The Bruteforce.Generic.RDP attacks were mostly aimed at remote workers in the region, according to the company, highlighting deepening cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Naturally, working from home or anywhere out of the office requires employees to log in to corporate resources remotely from their personal devices. One of the most common tools used for this purpose is RDP,” said Kaspersky general manager for Southeast Asia Yeo Siang Tiong.
“Microsoft 365 is still the preferred software used by enterprises and SEA boasts of more than 680 million people, half of which are under 30 and are highly tech-savvy. So we see the use of this protocol to continue as remote working remains the norm and expect that malicious actors will continue their chase to compromise companies and organizations here through brute-force attacks,” he added.
RDP is a protocol proprietary to Microsoft computers that provides users with a graphical interface to connect to other computers on a network. The protocol is commonly used to remotely control servers and other computers.
Meanwhile, a Bruteforce.Generic.RDP attack breaks into a system by systematically checking all possible RDP login and password combinations until a valid one is found.
