This unprecedented time observes the threat actors to exploit the trusted cloud solutions and applications to conduct cloud malware delivery and phishing attacks, claims a Netskope study.
Cyber attackers are today, increasingly abusing the popular cloud services in order to evade legacy security defences – putting critical enterprise data and information at risk.
With cloud solutions usage on the rise, a recent Netskope research study reveals that the number of cloud applications in use per company has increased by 20% in 2020. Today, organizations with 500-2,000 employees use 664 distinct cloud applications (on average) per month. Out of these apps, nearly 50% have a poor Cloud Confidence Index (CCI).
The threat actors can thus exploit the trusted cloud solutions and apps – especially for cloud malware delivery as well as cloud phishing. The study found that the malware delivery continues to shift into the cloud environment. In fact, almost 61% of the malware delivered via a cloud application, which is up from 48% YOY.
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Certainly, the widespread acceptance of enterprise cloud apps makes them a significant aim for the phishing attacks. Cloud apps are the target of about 36% of phishing campaigns at the present, while most of the phishing lures are still on the traditional websites.
As a result, cyber attackers are using cloud apps more than ever to hold grips in enterprise landscape. Lately, the volume of malicious attacks through Microsoft office docs have increased by around 58% since threat actors are increasingly using malicious documents as Trojans. This is to deliver next stage contents, including backdoors and ransomware.
Furthermore, with the help of cloud app delivery to evade web defences and legacy email, the malicious Office documents take over almost 27% of all the malware downloads blocked and detected. This is also happening as sensitive data in personal applications continues to grow.
For instance, work and home time continue to mix up in the remote workforce ecosystem. Personal application instances within the enterprise have increased – with almost 83% of people accessing their personal app on the corporate devices.
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In fact, the average enterprise user usually uploads 20 files into their personal apps each month from such managed devices. Personal application practice in the enterprise landscape greatly increases the possibility of data being leaked or mishandled.
In this context, Ray Canzanese, Threat Research Director at Netskope has explained in the company blog post – “Enterprises using the cloud need to quickly modernize and extend their security architectures to understand data content and context for apps, cloud services, and web user activity.”
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