A new malware developed by Sandworm hacking group has targeted appliances that are fire walled and reports are in that the military intelligence of the Russian Federation developed the malicious software.
A joint statement released by UK’s NCSC in association with US CISA, FBI and NSA states that the security vulnerabilities in firewalls are being exploited by Russian Military who are then found injecting a newly developed malware dubbed, Cyclops Blink, that can infiltrate networked devices such as routers, in order to gain access to computer networks. Â
Interestingly, Cyclops Blink has been operational since June 2019 and is now being developed into espionage conducting software from just a mere persistent remote access malware accessing WatchGuard Firewall appliances.
Keeping devices updated with the latest software, using multi-factor authentication, segregating management interfaces of network devices from the internet and changing passwords once or twice in a month is being advised by NCSC to safeguard their IT assets from being attacked by Cyclops Blink malware.
Now some statistic facts about malware
1.) According to a report released by Cisco Talos, over 1 billion malware programs have been tested and discovered to date- since 2013.
2.) As per SonicWall’s findings, over 560,000 malware instances are detected every day and over 17 million malware instances are registered each month.
3.) In the first half of 2020 alone, SonicWall registered over 3.2 billion malware attacks. And a 62% surge was observed in the detection of malware variants.
4.) As per Google’s 2021 report, only 7% of websites tested by the company were found holding/spreading malware and most of the infectious web portals were detected to have come up between September 2020 to July 2021- i.e. when the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak and most of the public and private companies have opted for a WFH culture.
5.) In the year 2020, over 20 million IoT malware attacks were detected and among them, over three in four affected devices were routers.
6.) Statista published in its 2020 malware report, China was having the highest number of malware infected computers in the world, followed by Turkey and then by Taiwan.
