Security News > 2020 > April > COVID-19 Lockdown Fuels Increase in RDP Attacks
According to Kaspersky, the number of brute-force RDP attacks has rocketed all around the world.
At the beginning of March, the security company was observing in the low hundreds of thousands of RDP attempts per country, per day, but the volume grew to nearly 1 million attacks per day toward the end of the month, in some countries.
"The lockdown has seen the appearance of a great many computers and servers able to be connected remotely, and right now we are witnessing an increase in cybercriminal activity with a view to exploiting the situation to attack corporate resources that have now been made available to remote workers," Kaspersky says.
Brute-force attackers hypothesized that the number of poorly configured RDP servers would increase following the mass transition to working from home, and immediately attempted to take advantage of the situation.
Organizations that employ RDP for their work are advised to adopt strong passwords, ensure that RDP is available through a corporate VPN only, set up and use Network Level Authentication, enable two-factor authentication, and disable and close the RDP port if the protocol is not used.