Researchers at Netscope, an American software company, and a computer security platform, find that the majority of malware is now delivered via cloud applications.
The findings have been published in the February 2021 Netskope Cloud and Threat Report. In the report, the researchers detail the most interesting trends in spheres like enterprise cloud service, app use, and web and cloud threats.
Netscope used anonymized data collected from the Netskope Security Cloud platform from millions of users from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020.
Of interest, Netscope reports a 48% jump in malware delivered via cloud apps, compared to last year. More specifically, 61% of malware is now delivered via cloud applications, researchers say.
As the number of cloud apps in use per organization increased 20% last year, we saw a growing trend in which attackers abuse cloud services to bypass security tools. Among affected products are leading applications like Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, and SharePoint, the 2020 Netskope Cloud and Threat Report states.
The experts from Netscope found that businesses with 500 to 2,000 employees use on average 664 cloud apps per month. The business’ growing dependence on cloud apps makes enterprises a hot target for cybercriminals.
Netsope reports that 36% of phishing campaigns target cloud app credentials, more than the previous year. While most phishers still mostly rely on traditional websites for delivering their threats, last year saw more attackers adopt cloud apps with 13% of phishing pages in 2020 being hosted in the cloud.
The use of infected Office documents as Trojans to deliver next-stage payloads such as ransomware and backdoors has also grown by 58% and constitute 27% of all malware downloads, researchers report.
Finally, as a result of the work from home shift employees’ use of personal apps in the enterprise’s remote workplace increaseв to 83%.
With users accessing personal apps on corporate devices and uploading files and documents to them, enterprise security faces whole new challenges.
