The volume of cyberattacks on UK companies grew more than a quarter in 2018, surging to over 1,500 attacks a day on average.
Each UK business received around 280,000 cyberattacks according to analysis from business ISP business Beaming.
The company said that IP address analysis reveals that most attacks originate from China, Brazil and Russia, and remotely controlled IoT devices were the most targeted business applications.
Just under a fifth (16 per cent) of these IP addresses were located in China. Much of the cyber-attack activity in November and December was traced to IP addresses in Brazil and Russia.
Twelve per cent and seven percent of the IP addresses used to target UK companies in 2018 were located in Brazil and Russia respectively.
On average, businesses were subjected to 489 attacks a day targeting these systems in the final quarter of 2018. File sharing applications attracted 277 attacks a day and databases 120 attacks a day over the same period.
“As an ISP, we can see what is happening on the internet and take steps to help customers protect themselves and those they do business with,” said Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming.
“We’ve seen a huge surge in criminal activity online in the final months of 2018. UK businesses were attacked at least once every two minutes last year, making it the worst year on record for cyber-attacks.”
“While there is plenty that we can do at a network level to minimise the threat of online attacks, businesses need to take cyber security seriously and put in place multiple layers of protection to ensure they don’t expose their people, assets, customers and businesses partners to undue risk.”