The number of malicious programs for “Internet of things” devices has increased more than 10 times

The number of malicious programs for devices “Internet of things” has increased more than 10 times in comparison with the year 2015, reports TASS with reference to the report of the company “Kaspersky Lab”.

According to experts, in 2013 viruses to “smart” devices was only 46, in 2014 their number increased to 193, and in 2015 reached almost 700. In the first half of this year, there are more than 7.2 thousand. However, according to Gartner, total worldwide there are now more than 6 billion “smart” devices.

The study of the topic experts of the Russian company made an experiment: they created several traps that mimicked a “smart” device. Almost immediately it tried to connect hackers, and the day it was tens of thousands of hits. With over 63% of all such attacks had on the smart IP cameras, and DVRs. About 16% of attacks are carried out with network devices and routers, and 1% occurred in a Wi-Fi repeater, TV-tuner, IP-telephony, printers and devices “smart home”. The remaining 20% of the devices to unambiguously identify failed.

As for the geography of attacks, the largest number of traps were produced from China (14%), in second place was Vietnam (12%), and the third – Russia (7%), which is slightly ahead of Brazil, Turkey and Taiwan.

“The safety of “smart” devices is a very serious issue and we all need to think about. The past year has shown that it is not just possible, but a very real threat,” summed up the results of the study, the expert on cyber security, “Kaspersky Lab” Vladimir Pieces.

In his opinion, the number of malicious programs for such devices will continue to increase, and one of the points of growth may be the market of DDoS attacks, the high level of competition which encourages criminals to search for new resources that would help them to make increasingly powerful attacks.

Recall that the DDoS attacks (from the English. distributed denial of service distributed denial of service) called the creation of a large number of requests for a particular website, causing the server can not stand and the site opens with a large delay or at some time stops responding to requests.