Cloud security issues raising alarm
dubai — Every organisation’s prime concern would be the security of its data and yet an alarming number of firms have reported a public cloud security incident last year, according to State of Cloud Security 2020, a global survey from Sophos.
The study points out that almost 75 per cent of organisations from the UAE experienced a public cloud security incident in 2019, including ransomware (28 per cent), other malware (54 per cent), exposed data (15 per cent), compromised accounts (17 per cent) and cryptojacking (17 per cent). Globally, organisations running multicloud environments are greater than 50 per cent more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.
“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,” said Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at Sophos.
Accidental exposure continues to plague organisations, with misconfigurations exploited in 76 per cent of reported attacks in the UAE. Detailed
in the SophosLabs 2020 Threat
Report, misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities. Despite this, only around a quarter of organisations (26 per cent) in the UAE say lack of staff expertise is a top area of concern.
Richard Botley, cyber resilience strategist at Mimecast, said: “Public
cloud services are accelerating in the GCC as the pandemic agenda is forcing organisations to make pragmatic decisions about business transformation, cost and risk... cybercriminals are now [also] retargeting their impersonation and ransomware attacks from office networks to the cloud services that employees use from home.”
UAE firms need to layer cloud defences and build a continuity and backup plan that helps organisations quickly return to standard operations without losing critical data or productivity, he said, adding that e-mail remains the single easiest way for an attacker to break into a network.