According to The State of Cloud Security 2020, a global survey from cybersecurity specialist Sophos, nearly three quarters (70 per cent) of organisations experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year
These incidents included ransomware and other malware (50 per cent), exposed data (29 per cent), compromised accounts (25 per cent), and cryptojacking (17 per cent). Organisations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50 per cent more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.
Europeans have suffered the lowest percentage of cloud security incidents, an indicator that compliance with the guidelines of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) helps protect organisations from being compromised. India, on the other hand, faced the worst, with last year's attack hit 93 percent of organisations.
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 organisations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads. Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organisations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers.”
Accidental exposure continues to plague organisations with 66 per cent of reported attacks exploiting misconfigurations. Misconfigurations drive most incidents in detail in the SophosLabs 2020 Threat Report, and are all too common given the complexities of cloud management.
Additionally, 33 per cent of organisations report that cyber criminals gained access through stolen credentials from cloud providers. Despite this, only a quarter of organisations say access management to cloud accounts is a top concern.
Furthermore, data from Sophos Cloud Optix, a cloud security posture management tool, reveals that 91 per cent of accounts have over privileged identity and access management roles, and 98 per cent have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.
Nearly all respondents (96 per cent) admit that they are concerned about their current cloud security level, an encouraging sign that it is top of mind and important. Appropriately, for nearly half of respondents, ‘data leaks’ top the list of security concerns (44 percent); identifying and responding to security incidents is a close second (41 percent). Despite this silver lining, only one out of four respondents view lack of personnel expertise as a top concern.
