Over 6 lakh attacks on Mumbai Cloud server honeypot

A honeypot is a system intended to mimic likely targets of cyberattackers for security researchers to monitor cybercriminal behaviour

Cybercriminals attempted attacks on a Mumbai Cloud server honeypot more than 678,000 times in a month, which was second to Ohio in the US that recorded more than 950,000 login attempts, among a total of 10 honeypots placed globally, global cybersecurity major Sophos said on Wednesday.

The honeypots were set-up in 10 of the most popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the world, including California, Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Ohio, Paris, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Sydney over a 30-day period from mid-January to mid-February.

A honeypot is a system intended to mimic likely targets of cyberattackers for security researchers to monitor cybercriminal behaviour.

According to Sophos' "Exposed: Cyberattacks on Cloud Honeypots" report, over five million attacks were attempted on the global network of honeypots, thus, demonstrating how cybercriminals are automatically scanning for weak open Cloud buckets.

Cloud servers were subjected to 13 attempted attacks per minute, per honeypot, on an average.

With businesses across the globe increasingly adopting Cloud technology, the report revealed the extent to which businesses migrating to hybrid and all-Cloud platforms are at risk.

"The aggressive speed and scale of attacks on devices demonstrates the use of botnets to target an organisation's Cloud platform," Sunil Sharma, Managing Director, Sales, India and Saarc, Sophos, said in a statement.

Continuous visibility of public Cloud infrastructure is vital for businesses to ensure compliance and to know what to protect, the report emphasised.

However, multiple development teams within an organisation and an ever-changing, auto-scaling environment make this difficult for IT security.

"Instead of inundating security teams with a massive number of undifferentiated alerts, Sophos Cloud Optix significantly minimises alert fatigue by identifying what is truly meaningful and actionable," said Ross McKerchar, CISO, Sophos.

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