New servers are prone to attack by cyber criminals (hackers) just after an hour that they are switched on, according to new research coming in. The servers were part of an experiment that was called upon by the BBC, asking a security firm to carry out an experiment to figure out just how many attacks that the servers have to face.
Security firm Cybereason has found that just after about 71 minutes that the servers are set up online, they were visited by automated attack tools that scanned them for weaknesses that may be used to exploit the system.
The servers were accessible online for about 170 hours to form a cyber-attack sampling tool known as a honeypot, said Israel Barak, chief information security officer at Cybereason, giving further clarification by saying that: “We set out to map the automatic attack activity.” The servers were given real, public IP addresses and other identifying information that announced their presence online.
To give more of a realistic tone, each one superficially resembled a legit server. Each one of them could even accept requests for web pages, file transferring and secure networking.
The servers were not capable of doing anything more than providing a very basic response to a query about these basic network services and protocols, this further proven by the fact that Israel Barak stating that such servers had no more depth than this.
He also said that if the hackers ended up getting into the system, there was nothing there for them to find.
Mr. Israel is also noted saying that the servers’ limited responses did not deter the automated attack tools or bots, that many cyber-thieves use to find potential targets.
Mr. Barak has also acknowledged that the techniques used by the bots can be treated as a very good guide as to exactly what the potential victims should do to avoid falling victim. He said that the organizations should always be checking apps to make sure that they are not victim to well know bugs, and should always enforce strong passwords, amongst other things which can be done.
