The internet landscape has been marred by a surprising quantity of malicious actors who are making it less safe than might have been the case otherwise. The folks at CrowdSec recently released a report that shed some light on the sheer quantity of malicious IP addresses that can be found online, and it turns out that most of them hail from three regions: India, Russia and the US.
All three countries had over a million malicious IPs apiece, but in spite of the fact that this is the case, not all of them are behaving the same way. It turns out that 60% of these malicious IP addresses are focused on one thing: scanning the internet for potential vulnerabilities.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that 23% are actively trying to exploit whatever vulnerabilities have been found. This goes to show that brute force is not as formidable a threat as some might expect. Scanning and exploiting vulnerabilities is far more prevalent, and it is extremely dangerous because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up compromising multiple sites and accounts.
One thing that bears mentioning is that 20% of these threats are using IPv6 to mask their true location. This might mean that the three locations mentioned above do not represent the nationalities of the attackers in question, but rather the locations of the IPs that they are using. Between May and June of 2023, this number went up to 35%.
This correlates to a similar uptick in widespread scanning, and if steps are not taken a slew of new attacks may be on the horizon. A common concern that this report dispelled was that VPNs are being used by criminals to avoid detection. Only 5% of the IP addresses that were spotted were found to be using VPNs, which confirms that they are mostly being used by regular consumers who would like to maintain some semblance of privacy while they are surfing the web.
Read next: Unmasking the Cyber Extortion Kings: The Shocking Truth Behind Email Scams!
All three countries had over a million malicious IPs apiece, but in spite of the fact that this is the case, not all of them are behaving the same way. It turns out that 60% of these malicious IP addresses are focused on one thing: scanning the internet for potential vulnerabilities.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that 23% are actively trying to exploit whatever vulnerabilities have been found. This goes to show that brute force is not as formidable a threat as some might expect. Scanning and exploiting vulnerabilities is far more prevalent, and it is extremely dangerous because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up compromising multiple sites and accounts.
One thing that bears mentioning is that 20% of these threats are using IPv6 to mask their true location. This might mean that the three locations mentioned above do not represent the nationalities of the attackers in question, but rather the locations of the IPs that they are using. Between May and June of 2023, this number went up to 35%.
This correlates to a similar uptick in widespread scanning, and if steps are not taken a slew of new attacks may be on the horizon. A common concern that this report dispelled was that VPNs are being used by criminals to avoid detection. Only 5% of the IP addresses that were spotted were found to be using VPNs, which confirms that they are mostly being used by regular consumers who would like to maintain some semblance of privacy while they are surfing the web.
Read next: Unmasking the Cyber Extortion Kings: The Shocking Truth Behind Email Scams!
