Nearly two in five (39%) businesses will experience a data breach in a cloud environment in 2022, a 4% increase compared to 2021, according to a new report.
of 2023 Thales Global Cloud Security SurveyThe study, which surveyed nearly 3,000 IT and security professionals in 18 countries, also revealed that 2022 will see a significant increase in sensitive data stored in the cloud compared to the previous year. . His three-quarters (75%) of respondents said that more than his 40% of the data stored in their organization’s cloud environment is “sensitive” data. In contrast, in 2021 he was 39% of companies.
Target the human factor
According to the report, human error was the leading cause of cloud data breaches at 55%. This was significantly higher than exploitation of vulnerabilities, which was the next highest factor identified by respondents (21%).
Targeting users and infiltrating cloud networks is also a trend observed by cybersecurity firm Proofpoint. Proofpoint cybersecurity strategist Matt Cook said: Information security: “Attackers are aware that people and their accounts are still vulnerable. And since everyone uses pretty much the same tools, it doesn’t really matter where the person is. For example , everyone has a Microsoft 365 account.”
proof point Human factors in 2023 The report found that 94% of monitored cloud tenants were targeted with precision or brute force attacks in a given month. Of these tenants, 62% were successfully attacked.
“From an attacker’s perspective, if you have a list of usernames and passwords and you think they might belong to a particular company, why not try them against those accounts? You can see that it’s progressing quite noticeably,” Cook commented.
app-based threats
A Thales report highlighted a 41% increase in SaaS usage from 2021 to 2023, highlighting that these applications are increasingly replacing on-premises application functionality. More than half (55%) of cyber professionals say this expansion has made protecting data in the cloud more complex.
Additionally, respondents ranked SaaS apps (38%) as the most attacked surface area in 2022, followed by cloud storage (36%).
Proofpoint’s Cooke also highlighted apps as a key area of cloud security. He outlined an increasing trend of malicious third-party applications connecting to an organization’s cloud accounts. Here, an attacker tricks a user into granting permission to her malicious OAuth app to access the user’s legitimate cloud services.
“You’ll see a pop-up from the app asking for permission to your account, which was probably confirmed during installation,” Cook explained. “At some point it turned into a malicious app, and that malicious app gained full access to the account, which led to the account takeover.”
Multicloud complexity
Another Trend Confirmed in Thales 2023 Global Cloud Security Survey Multi-cloud adoption continues to skyrocket, with 79% of surveyed organizations deploying multiple cloud providers by 2022.
Chris Harris, EMEA Technical Associate Vice President of Data Security at Thales, said: Information security Multi-cloud environments add to the cybersecurity challenges for organizations as they mean multiple security controls and data protection models that need to be understood and implemented.
“Inconsistencies in configuration and compatibility can create gaps that can increase the risk of compromise or intrusion by malicious attackers,” he outlined. “As organizations move critical data to multi-cloud environments, it becomes increasingly important to revisit the cybersecurity measures in place. The solution is likely to no longer work ‘enough’. “
Measures for organizations
According to the survey, only 22% of those surveyed said 60% or more of their cloud data is encrypted. Furthermore, on average, only 45% of sensitive data stored in the cloud is encrypted.
Thales highlighted a number of factors that could explain low-level encryption, including a lack of understanding of certain cloud cryptographic operations and concerns about developer productivity limitations. Harris noted that multi-cloud environments add complexity, requiring organizations to adopt new approaches to encryption.
“In a multi-cloud world, organizations need to find a way to centrally manage the encryption keys used to manage access across their infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the cloud,” he explains. Did.
The report also highlights the importance of increasing adoption of strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure cloud data access, implemented by 65% of respondents.
Proofpoint’s Cooke agreed that MFA is an important tool in cloud security, but cautioned against viewing MFA as a “silver bullet” as cyber threat actors are becoming increasingly adept at MFA bypass techniques. I warned the organization.
Another important security approach, Cooke said, is to continuously monitor attempts to target users. “We encourage organizations to use tools that help identify suspicious logins and behavior within the cloud platform,” he said.
