The external cyberattacks on cloud services and collaboration tools like WebEx and Zoom increased by 630% between January and April, cybersecurity firm McAfee announced.
A study named ‘Cloud Adoption and Risk Report- Work-from-Home Edition’ revealed that there had been an upsurge in the usage of cloud services, access from unmanaged devices, and the rise of cloud-native threats. The behavior emphasizes that there is a need for new security models in today’s work from home culture and in the future. The study was based on aggregated and anonymized data from more than 30 million McAfee MVISION Cloud users worldwide.
The overall adoption of cloud services increased by 50%, and the implementation of cloud collaboration tools increased by up to 600%. The reports by McAfee also revealed that most of the external attacks targeted collaboration services like Microsoft 365. Moreover, there were many attempts to access cloud accounts with stolen credentials too.
It also said that access to cloud by unmanaged and personal devices just got doubled, which calls for security professionals to add another layer of protection to keep the data safe and secure in the cloud.
“We are witnessing an explosive increase in remote working and adoption of collaborative tools across industries in India. We have seen Cloud-native threats multiply seven-fold. Cybercriminals are adept at adjusting their strategies and are now focusing their efforts to exploit the sudden acceleration in cloud adoption,” said Sanjay Manohar, MD of McAfee India.
“In addition, cloud traffic from unmanaged devices and unsecure networks expose businesses to massive risk. Mitigating this risk will require companies to establish an integrated cloud security posture and deploy solutions that have visibility and security controls across every cloud service,” he added.
The data collected between January and April covers companies across major industries such as financial services, healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, real estate, energy, and business services.