Chinese Companies Seeing Deluge Of Cyberattacks

The U.S. and Europe aren’t the only two areas that are seeing an increased amount of cyberattacks. According to a Reuters report, Chinese companies are seeing a deluge of attacks in recent weeks.

Reuters, citing a PwC survey, found the number of cyberattacks on Chinese companies during the past two years has skyrocketed thanks to the proliferation of Internet of Things devices that can connect to the internet and talk to each other.

According to the report, the number of cyberattacks discovered by Chinese companies grew an eye-opening 969 percent from 2014 to 2016. That amounts to an average of more than seven a day for each of the 440 Chinese companies that responded to the survey. The rise in China comes at a time when the average number of attacks declined by 3 percent globally during the last two years and 30 percent since 2015. The culprit for the increased attacks: IoT.

“IoT devices in general have not paid attention to cybersecurity,” said Marin Ivezic, a partner on cybersecurity at PwC in Hong Kong, told Reuters. “In China and Hong Kong … we have more adoption than anywhere else in the world.”

Reuters noted the Chinese companies that took part in the survey said they reduced their budget for cybersecurity by 7.6 percent in 2016.

In September, a record-breaking digital attack took down a host of online sites. According to Forbes, these significant distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks even successfully knocked independent cybersecurity news site Krebs on Security offline, with somewhere between 600 gigabits per second and 700 gigabits per second of traffic. Two sources familiar with the attacks told Forbes that the victims targeted by the hacker crew were hit by tens of thousands of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as unsecure routers, digital video recorders and connected IP cameras. These connected devices have been reported as vulnerable to hacks and, when compromised, can be used to send extremely large volumes of traffic to a site.