Dubai: More than seven million cyber attacks have been foiled in Saudi Arabia in the first three months of 2021, local media reported.
According to a new Kaspersky report, the number of cyber attacks rose significantly by 104 per cent from 983,512 in February to 2 million in March. The jump coincided with the government’s announcement restricting office work and other activities.
The report suggested that the most common attacks were against the protocols used by employees to access corporate resources remotely, emphasizing the need for cyber security awareness.
Saudi Arabia saw more than 22.5 million brute force attacks in 2020 on remote desktop protocols (RDPs), the most popular way to access Windows or servers.
Malicious attempt
Also last year, a staggering 95 per cent of Saudi businesses experienced a business-impacting cyber attack or compromise.
During the G20 summit held in November 2020, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) said it aborted as many as 2,372,028 cyber attacks that targeted online portals of the G20 summit.
A cyber attack is a malicious and deliberate attempt by an individual or organization to breach the information system of another individual or organization.
A cyber attack can maliciously disable computers, steal data, or use a breached computer as a launch point for other attacks.
Cyber criminals use a variety of methods to launch a cyber attack, including malware, phishing, ransomware, denial of service, among other methods.
