A recent assessment revealed how small businesses globally had been victimised by increased cyberattacks in the past years, including password-stealing malware. Trojan-PSW, or Trojan Password Stealing Ware, was included in the detailed assessment, showing an uptick in its activities against small businesses for the first quarter of 2022.
Researchers concluded that password stealers, specifically the Trojan-PSW, are the main threats against the industry of small businesses. Over 4 million Trojan-PSW were detected for this year, which is a million more than what has been identified in 2021 from the same period with only 3 million.
The countries with the largest detected increase in Trojan-PSW attacks include Colombia, Canada, Brazil, Serbia, Russia, Hungary, Mexico, and the US.
These countries have all seen a significant surge in numbers in terms of password stealers that targeted small businesses per respective territories.
Internet attacks have also been widespread among small to medium-sized firms for 2022, with about 35.4 million detected. These internet attacks are composed of various attack vectors from different threat operators, including forced redirects, malware-infested websites, and browser hijacking.
Included as well in the detailed assessment was the attack against RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), wherein cybercriminals have abused, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the tool aids remote workers in accessing their corporate servers even from home, hackers leveraged it to launch attacks, with the US being the most affected country.
Aside from the US, experts also recorded an increase in RDP attacks from the UK, the Netherlands, Brazil, Italy, and Chile. Meanwhile, some countries have reported a decline in these attacks, including Hong Kong, Iran, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Peru.
According to an expert, hackers exploit RDP since the pandemic has forced employees to work from their homes, thus an opportunity to leverage the tool for their attacks. On the other hand, the Trojan-PSW had been an effective medium to back up the RDP attacks to compromise accounts and infiltrate company networks.
As of now, cybersecurity experts are still seeing an upward surge of these attacks for 2022’s first quarter and will continue to monitor for changes until the end of this year.
