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The number of attacks on remote desktops brute force password rose in April to five times in comparison with February, according to “Kaspersky Lab”. These attacks do novice hackers selling access to corporate infrastructure with more advanced colleagues, explain the experts on cyber security: a number of these proposals on the black market grew serious.In April, the number of attacks on the infrastructure of Russian organizations, whose employees work remotely, exceeded 18 million, five times more than in February, told “Kommersant” in the “Kaspersky Lab”. We are talking about the brute force attacks of passwords on the device with the Windows operating system that support remote access Protocol RDP.According to him, such attack is very simple, hackers use, for example, dictionaries of common passwords or passwords of the “leaked” databases. Brute force password use on average 70% of attacks on remote desktops via RDP, says the Director of the center for monitoring and responding to cyber threats Solar JSOC of the company “Rostelecom” Vladimir Dryukov, confirming that the growth of such attacks.Up to 48% of the passwords employees of organizations made up of a combination of the word indicating time of the year or the month, and four digits indicating the year, found in Positive Technologies. Such passwords are selected by dictionaries in a matter of minutes, although formally comply with password policies, said head of Department of Analytics of information security Positive Technologies Evgeny Gnedin.Less experienced hackers sell the data to access more advanced counterparts, says the head of Analytics and special projects CC InfoWatch Andrei Arsentiev. In recent months on the black market increased the number of offers of access to the corporate infrastructure at a price of $5-10 to tens of thousands of dollars, he said.In the first quarter of 2020 the number of proposals for the sale of around the world in 69% higher than the previous quarter, said Yevgeny Gnedin. A surge of such attacks, “Kaspersky Lab” associated with the hasty transition to udalenku: IT-service companies cared more about the remote workstation, than about his safety.To protect against attacks, “Kaspersky Lab” advises companies to use a corporate VPN and two-factor authentication, and employees to set strong passwords. Thus, according to Positive Technologies, only every tenth organization will introduce two-factor authentication, the majority of the companies hopes that working remotely will soon be over, and are not willing to invest in the organization of secure remote access.Yulia Stepanova

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Jennifer Alvarez is an investigative journalist and is a correspondent for European Union. She is based in Zurich in Switzerland and her field of work include covering human rights violations which take place in the various countries in and outside Europe. She also reports about the political situation in European Union. She has worked with some reputed companies in Europe and is currently contributing to USA News as a freelance journalist. As someone who has a Masters’ degree in Human Rights she also delivers lectures on Intercultural Management to students of Human Rights. She is also an authority on the Arab world politics and their diversity.