Seven in ten (70 per cent) of organisations experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year – including ransomware and other malware (50pc), exposed data (29pc), compromised accounts (25pc), and cryptojacking (17pc), according to a cyber firm’s report. Those running multi-cloud systems are greater than 50pc more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud, said Sophos.
Europeans suffered the lowest percentage of security incidents in the cloud, a sign the firm says that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines are helping to protect IT users from being compromised. India, on the other hand, fared the worst, with 93pc of organisations being hit by an attack in the last year.
Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos said: “Ransomware, not surprisingly, is one of the most widely reported cybercrimes in the public cloud. The most successful ransomware attacks include data in the public cloud, according to the State of Ransomware 2020 report, and attackers are shifting their methods to target cloud environments that cripple necessary infrastructure and increase the likelihood of payment.
“The recent increase in remote working provides extra motivation to disable cloud infrastructure that is being relied on more than ever, so it’s worrisome that many organizations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads. Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organizations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers.”
Accidental exposure continues, with misconfigurations exploited in 66pc of reported attacks. Detailed in the SophosLabs 2020 Threat Report, misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities. Also, a third of organisations report that cybercriminals gained access through stolen cloud provider account credentials. Despite this, only a quarter say managing access to cloud accounts is a top area of concern. Data from Sophos Cloud Optix, a cloud security posture management tool, suggests that 91pc of accounts have overprivileged identity and access management roles, and 98pc have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.
Nearly all respondents (96pc) admit to concern about their current level of cloud security, a sign that it’s top of mind and important. ‘Data leaks’ top the list of security concerns for nearly half of respondents (44pc); identifying and responding to security incidents is a close second (41pc). One in four respondents view lack of staff expertise as a top concern.
About the survey
The State of Cloud Security 2020 report covers findings of an independent survey by polling firm Vanson Bourne among more than 3,500 IT managers across 26 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa that host data and workloads in the public cloud. The full report, with a detailed list of cloud security recommendations, is available at https://secure2.sophos.com/en-us/content/state-of-cloud-security.aspx.
