The explosive growth of Internet of Things devices means that businesses are more vulnerable to cybersecurity risks than ever before, claim a couple of new studies on IoT security.

F5 Networks Inc., a U.S. company that sells application threat intelligence tools for enterprises, said in its new global IoT threat report released today that attacks on IoT devices and infrastructure have risen by 280 percent from January through June. The company said a big chunk of this growth stems from the rise of Mirai malware, which infects IoT devices and gathers them into massive bot networks.

F5 also claimed that 83 percent of IoT attacks in the period came via a single hosting provider, called SoloGigabit, which is based in Spain. “We believe this is direct threat actor activity building a Thingbot verses compromised IoT devices unwittingly launching attacks,” the report noted. “This raises big questions about who is responsible and how it should be regulated.”

The report also found that China is no longer the main source of IoT attacks. The country, which was previously responsible for more attacks than any other, saw its attack volume decline to just 1 percent. F5 speculated that this could be due to a clampdown by China on compromised IoT systems.

Perhaps even more interesting, a second study published Tuesday by IoT security firm Pwnie Express found that small to midsized business are generally better prepared than large enterprises to deal with IoT threats. The survey of 950 information technology professionals found that small and midsized businesses routinely check IoT devices for signs of malicious infections much more frequently than large enterprises. Some 64 percent of them checked their devices in the last month, compared with just 55 percent of large enterprises. In addition, almost a third of smaller companies checked their employees’ own devices for infections in the last month, compared with just 20 percent of larger organizations.

The reports are particularly concerning because of the expected growth in the number of IoT devices in the world. Gartner Inc. recently forecast that the number of connected devices will rise by 31 percent, to 8.4 billion, by the end of this year.

As a result, F5 Networks said, “now is the time to act on behalf of your business before another Death Star-sized attack is launched.”

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