'The whole world at home', the demand for RDP and VPN skyrocketed

The demand for remote access technologies such as RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and VPN (Virtual Private Network) has grown tremendously, up to 41% and 33% respectively, shortly after COVID-19 pandemic became a global health problem.

The move comes as a large number of companies worldwide are forced to work from home to limit the spread of disease. Meanwhile, working from home often requires employees to connect to the company's intranet via remote access technologies such as those mentioned above. Therefore, this increase has been predicted in advance, helping service providers to take timely adjustments to avoid being overwhelmed.

Specifically, according to the statistics of the search engine, scanning and indexing devices connected to the Internet Shodan, the number of RDP endpoints (RDP endpoints) has increased from 3 million (recorded at the beginning. in 2020) to nearly 4.4 million as of Sunday March 29.

However, the data only includes endpoints running on standard RDP port 3389. According to founder Shodan John Matherly, the same surge has been noted on port 3388 - a port many administrators have. The system is used frequently to hide RDP services from malicious agents as well as online attackers.

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Similarly, the number of different servers running VPN protocols such as IKE and PPTP has also seen a spike, from 7.5 million systems, to nearly 10 million as of March 29 - showing the huge number of enterprise VPN servers installed as gateways for intranets and corporate networks around the world.

Not only for businesses, individual-level VPNs also have a spike in usage - for a variety of purposes. With most users being "trapped" indoors due to community isolation measures being imposed around the world, many have used VPN applications to gain access to blocked content. by geographic area while browsing the internet from a personal computer, resulting in a rapidly increasing number of users of VPN services.

For example, last week, NordVPN, one of the popular VPN service providers, said its service users had increased by 165% since March 11, while Atlas VPN also reported an increase in VPN usage is 124% only in the US market.

Demand for RDP and VPN is expected to increase dramatically in the near future as travel restrictions continue to expand in many countries, requiring service providers to plan ahead. , welcome 'to not be passive and can provide customers with the best quality of service.