Computers specially configured to make cyber criminals think they were small businesses operating in London were attacked by hackers over 2,000 times every minute this January.

The computers — called “honeypots” in the cybersecurity industry — were operated by cyber insurer Coalition as part of an exercise to assess the volume of cyber attacks directed against the UK’s capital.

The data is being supplied by Coalition to the Cyber Resilience Centre for London, a police-led, not-for-profit organization working in partnership with the Mayor of London’s Office for Policing and Crime.

Data from the honeypots showed that over the course of 28 days in January, the devices were attacked 91 million times by over 101,000 different hackers.

Russia was the single largest source of attacks, followed by Bulgaria, Monaco and Panama. However, Coalition’s experts pointed out that many cyber criminals hide their location by mounting attacks using virtual private networks (VPNs) routed through other countries.

Of the 91 million attacks recorded, 77 million were attempts to hack into remote desktop connections used by employees working out of their offices.

“These results show just how much home working has widened businesses’ attack surface — the number of Internet connections and vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit; 85 percent of attacks we saw were attempts to gain unauthorized access to these remote connections,” commented Dr Simon Bell, Coalition’s UK security researcher.

“We use honeypots to learn about threat actors and their methods. It’s a little like using decoy cars to attract car thieves. Once the attack happens, we can see what vulnerabilities the cyber criminal is looking for and how they try to exploit them. In this exercise, our honeypots were given IP addresses that identified as physical data centers in London,” Bell continued.

The data supplied by Coalition is incredibly valuable to us as we get real-time insights into the threat landscape of the city and the latest trends and techniques being deployed by cyber criminals,” said Simon Newman, CEO of the Cyber Resilience Centre for London.

“This allows us to tailor up-to-date guidance for our membership base of SMEs, which make up 99.8 percent of businesses across the capital. It also helps to illustrate the scale of the threat facing the business community, which in turn supports access to funding and partnerships that allows us to continue our important work,” Newman continued.

Coalition launched in the UK in September last year. The firm offers active cyber insurance: a combination of state-of-the-art cybersecurity protection combined with cyber insurance. Coalition’s automated scanning and monitoring system Coalition Control scans the Internet in real time, identifying vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.