Researchers set up 320 honeypots to see how quickly threat actors would target exposed cloud services and report that 80% of them were compromised in under 24 hours.
Malicious actors are constantly scanning the Internet for exposed services that could be exploited to access internal networks or perform other malicious activity.
To track what software and services are targeted by threat actors, researchers create publicly accessible honeypots. Honeypots are servers configured to appear as if they are running various software as lures to monitor threat actors' tactics.
In a new study conducted by Palo Altos Networks' Unit 42, researchers set up 320 honeypots and found that 80% of the honeypots were compromised within the first 24 hours.
The deployed honeypots included ones with remote desktop protocol (RDP), secure shell protocol (SSH), server message block (SMB), and Postgres database services and were kept alive from July to August 2021.
These honeypots were deployed worldwide, with instances in North America, Asian Pacific, and Europe.