2024 worst year on record for commercial cyberattacks, claims Beaming
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According to the analysis carried out by the company Shiningspecialized business provider.
This level of attack was four percent higher than in 2023making last year the worst ever for attempted cyberattacks as businesses faced new online threat every 42 seconds.
For the first time since 2021, the last quarter of 2024 was not the most fruitful period of the year for cyber attacks. The frequency of attacks peaked at 2,192 per day in the third quarter of 2024, before declining to 2,063 per day in the fourth quarter. Despite this reduction, the final three months of 2024 marked only the third quarter on record in which the average number of cyber attacks faced by UK businesses exceeded 2,000 per day.
Previously, 2023 was the worst year on record for cyber attacks on UK businesses, with each company facing an average of 720,252 malicious attempts to breach their systems. Before 2024, the average number of attacks per quarter exceeded 2,000 only in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Charts: Cyber attacks on British businesses by year and quarter
Remote IoT devices are the target of most cyberattacks
Hackers attacked remotely controlled devices connected to the network. Internet of Things most often in 2024. Business firewalls faced more than 161 attacks daily, targeting applications such as building management systems, CCTV cameras, network printers, remote monitoring systems and industrial automation systems.
Web applications, remote desktop software, and company databases were also frequently attacked, with companies typically experiencing more than 20 separate attacks daily on each of these systems in 2024.
Beaming tracks a quarter of hackers in China
Beaming analysts have identified more than a million IP addresses that were used in cyber attacks on UK businesses in 2024 and tracked almost a quarter (241,019) of them are to China. Beaming also revealed significant and growing volumes of cyberattacks that appeared to originate from areas within India (87,144 attacking IP addresses) and the US (81,112) in 2024.
Says Sonya Blizzard, Managing Director of Beaming:
“The rise of automated cyber attacks means the internet has never been more dangerous, and we expect it to become even more dangerous as hackers use AI.
“The good news is that we are not seeing a record number of companies affected by hackers because businesses are getting better at protecting themselves and ISPs like Beaming are working hard to prevent malicious activity at the network level.”
2025-01-08 12:22:57