A new study by security company Zscaler has revealed that attacks on Internet of Things (IoT) devices have ramped up 700% in two years.
In its IoT in the Enterprise: Empty Office Edition report, the company revealed the characteristics of IoT devices that it fingerprinted across its network of protected assets. During the two-week study period last December, the company also analyzed traffic coming from these machines to assess how much of it was malicious and what it did. Zscaler said it had blocked roughly 300,000 malware-related IoT transactions in those two weeks. This was a seven-fold increase in the malicious traffic it found during the 2019 study.
The company also found 900 unique payload deliveries to 18,000 unique hosts. Almost all those unique payloads (97%) belonged to the Gafgyt (63.1%) and Mirai (34.1%) botnets. However, the frequency of attacks was inverted; Mirai payloads accounted for 76% of attacks while Gafgyt payloads made up just 5% of attacks.