EVERY company included in a recent survey by cybersecurity expert Sophos have a high level of concern about the current levels of security in the public Cloud.
100 percent of the Philippine firms included in the report “The State of Cloud Security 2020,” said they are aware and afraid of ransomware, malware, exposed data, compromised accounts and cryptojacking which may cause data loss or even worst, damage brand and reputation.
“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,” Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos.
More than three quarters (82 percent) of organizations in the Philippines experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year — including ransomware and other malware (77 percent), exposed data (40 percent), compromised accounts (40 percent), and cryptojacking (16 percent).
Globally, organizations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50 percent more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.
Only last June Sophos published new research, “An Insider View into the Increasingly Complex Kingminer Botnet,” underscoring the use of servers in carrying out attacks and the importance of threat intelligence in detecting such activity. Malaya Business Insight carried the report here.
In that report, it was stated how the opportunistic Kingminer botnet attempts to gain server access by brute-forcing login credentials. Sophos discovered how it used the powerful but infamous EternalBlue exploit in an attempt to spread malware among other attack mechanisms.
Kingminer shares many of the attributes that advanced ransomware attackers use to gain access. The new version of Sophos EDR offers a custom-built query engine to detect indicators of compromise giving it the ability to hunt active attacks.
“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 organizations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads. Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organizations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers,” Wisniewski said referencing to the current practices brought in by the new normal.
The unintentional open door: how attackers break in
Accidental exposure continues to plague organizations, with misconfigurations exploited in 71 percent of reported attacks in the Philippines.
Detailed in the SophosLabs 2020 Threat Report, misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities.
Additionally, 27 percent of Philippine organizations report that cybercriminals gained access through stolen cloud provider account credentials. Despite this, less than half (32 percent) of organizations say managing access to cloud accounts is a top area of concern.
Data from Sophos Cloud Optix, a cloud security posture management tool, further reveals that 91 percent of global accounts have overprivileged identity and access management roles, and 98 percent have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.
The silver lining
All Philippine respondents (100 percent) admit to concern about their current level of cloud security, while more than half (58 percent) of the respondents understood that security of an organization is a shared responsibility between organizations, partners, and vendors. These are encouraging signs that security is top of mind. Appropriately, identifying and responding to security incidents top the list of security concerns for 39 percent of respondents; staying compliant with relevant regulations, as well as a lack of visibility into infrastructure both come a close equal second (34 percent).
About the Survey
The State of Cloud Security 2020 report highlights findings of an independent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne among more than 3,500 IT managers across 26 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa that currently host data and workloads in the public cloud.
The full report, along with a detailed list of cloud security recommendations, is available at https://secure2.sophos.com/en-us/content/state-of-cloud-security.aspx.
