Mumbai Cloud Server Honeypot Was Attacked More Than 6 Lakh Times

On April 10, the British security software and hardware company Sophos reported that there were over 678,000 attacks on a Mumbai Cloud server honeypot within a month. The number of attacks just stands behind that in Ohio, US – where cybercriminals tried to log in the server honeypot more than 950,000 times. At present, there are only 10 honeypots in the whole world.

These honeypots were chosen and built in the 10 most prominent data centers of Amazon Web Services or AWS in a variety of large cities including Singapore, Sydney, Sao Paulo, Paris, Ohio, London, Ireland, Frankfurt and California within more than 30 days from the middle of January to the middle of February.

For those unknown, a honeypot is a kind of system designed to simulate cyberattackers’ possible targets that help security researchers to manage the behavior of hackers.

In the report "Exposed: Cyberattacks on Cloud Honeypots" by Sophos, there were more than 50 lakhs attacks on the honeypots in the world. That shows us what cybercriminals have done to automatically scan and find out weak Cloud buckets.

On average, each minute went by, there were 13 attacks on each honeypot of cloud servers.

The statistics will be a warning for the global businesses who have increasingly adopted Cloud technologies, even when they are moving to all-Cloud and hybrid platforms.

In his statement, Sunil Sharma, who now serves as both a managing director at Sophos India and a leader of SAARC business, said,

In addition, the report also stressed that businesses need to have a clear vision towards public Cloud infrastructure as a solution to maintain compliance as well as to comprehend what they should protect.

However, each organization, as well as each auto-scaling environment, has many development teams. In other words, IT security must face a lot of difficulties. Sophos CISO Ross McKerchar said,