Vietnam, Indonesia, And Thailand Recorded The Most Bruteforce Attacks In Southeast Asia

Illustration of cyberattacks (photo: Kaspersky)

JAKARTA - global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky reports it has blocked more than 61 million Bruteforce attacks targeting businesses in Southeast Asia (SEA) by 2023.

From January to December 2023, a total of 61,374,948 Bruteforce.Generic.RDP.* was detected and thwarted by Kaspersky B2B products installed in companies of various sizes in the region.

The Bruteforce attack is a method of guessing passwords or encryption keys involving systematic experiments of all possible character combinations until correct characters are found.

While the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is Microsoft's protocol, which provides graphics interfaces for users to connect to other computers via the network. RDP is widely used by system administrators and non-technical users to remotely control servers and other PCs.

Usually, Kaspersky adds, the successful Bruteforce.Generic.RDP.* attack will allow attackers to gain long-distance access to targeted host computers.

Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand recorded the highest number of RDP attacks last year, with 25.9 million, 11.7 million, and 10.2 million attacks respectively in that period.

Meanwhile, Singapore has more than six million incidents, the Philippines is nearly five million, and Malaysia is the lowest with nearly three million attempts by Bruteforce.