An English Japanese media outlet called Asahi has announced that the number of hacking incidents affecting cryptocurrency networks doubled in 2018 compared to the number of reports in 2017.
The report which was published on March 7 revealed that the findings from Police Agency data indicating that there were roughly 2,752.8 intrusions per sensor per day in 2018. This represented a 45% increase compared to similar findings in 2017. The police report also claims that the majority of the attacks originated from outside Japan. The figures represent just the hacking attacks that targeted IoT devices and cryptocurrency networks.
“The number of intrusions of networks used for sending and receiving e-mail messages and browsing websites has remained at about the same level since 2016,” the report indicated.
Russian hackers topped the list of malicious attacks on Japan’s IoT and crypto networks
According to the Asahi report, 20.8% of the attacks originated from Russia and this represents the largest number of attacks from any specific country. China produced the second highest number of attacks at 14.1% while only 12.6% of the malicious hacks came from the U.S. Netherlands produced 6 percent of the hacks while only 5% of them came from Ukraine. Japanese hackers only accounted for 1.6% of all the malicious digital attacks on the cryptocurrency networks and IoT devices.
The Japanese National Police Agency uses a network detection system to monitor cyber-attacks. It evaluates the number of intrusions per sensor/IP address on a daily basis. It identified 2,752.8 intrusions per sensor per day in 2018. The NPA has encouraged people to set up ID-based and password-enabled logins as well as multi-factor authentication for their internet-enabled devices. This will make it harder for malicious hackers to access the devices.
A previous Japanese Police report published by Cointelegraph in February this year revealed that there were more than 7,000 cases of suspected money laundering activities facilitated by cryptocurrencies. This represents more than a 10-fold increase in the number of incidents reported over a nine-month duration in 2017. Cointelegraph also reported that five major banks in Japan have joined forces to introduce a distribution ledger technology-based financial services system.
