With businesses operating remotely and moving to the cloud, data theft is one of the preferred tactics by cybercriminals.
The pandemic has set forth various “new normal” for the organizations globally, and IT functions are no exception. Even with reduced technology budgets due to the economic recession, most companies are switching to cloud solutions – for more agility and improved scalability.
According to Flexera, about 59% of companies are planning to increase their cloud services spending in the post-coronavirus world. Another 30% of companies are planning to spend on the cloud “significantly” more. Besides, many businesses are still incorporating best practices around cloud security and risk management.
Industries are Moving to Edge Capture from Edge Computing
As a result of such incident response, the threat actors are adapting to these technologies and making the most of the current situation. The risk is high – especially with cloud systems holding a humungous amount of sensitive data, which can put the organizations in danger if breached.
As mentioned by Jim Ryan, President, and CEO at Flexera, in the company blog post, “Businesses today as we face the unprecedented operational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies plan to migrate more services to the cloud, yet they’re already exceeding cloud budgets. They will need to focus on optimizing workloads as they migrate in addition to cost management and governance to ensure operational efficiency.”
How Hackers Are Exploiting the Cloud Environments
In the evolving cloud computing ecosystem, the cloud systems are being targeted in various ways. The security incident teams at IBM X-Force IRIS have analyzed the common types of cloud compromises that were found in the past year.
Remote exploitation of cloud apps is one of the major concerns. It is accounted for nearly 45% of cloud cyber-security action. In some instances, vulnerable solutions were already present in the environment, but they remained undetected.
Organizations Experience an Explosion of Unaccounted Apps Due to Cloud
Furthermore, another prime concern is security flaws via misconfigurations – introduced by the users. In 2019, the threat actors took advantage of such misconfigured cloud servers to drain off more than 1 billion records from the compromised environments.
The consequent data leaks stay on as one of the primary sources of record loss spanning the board. This can rapidly enable access to sensitive data from companies. Thus, the attackers make the shadow IT a significant concern – when it comes to cloud security.
Clearly, businesses need to include cloud assets in their overall incident response strategy. Implementing security automation into cloud environments can enhance threat detection and related response capabilities.
