As COVID-19 impacted the world in such a way that no one ever expected organizations had to make major changes and strategize to survive. More than 100% rise in the adaptation of cloud technologies by organizations has been encountered in the past 12 months.
Organizations shifting to the cloud are facing or will be facing a great challenge of security.
In this article, we will discuss 3 interesting cloud security trends.
1. Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware works by infiltrating a user’s PC or mobile device via malicious software that is usually installed unintentionally after clicking a link in an email that’s posed as something else. Once installed, the software uses cryptography to prevent users from accessing their files and demands a sum of money to unencrypt the data.
The lack of security awareness among cloud users and lack of control and visibility has made the cloud services a popular target of ransomware attacks. Such attacks damaged several governments, non-government, small, and large firms and are estimated around 8 billion dollars in damage.
Ransomware as a Service is also gaining popularity these days and available over the dark web enables attacks regardless of coding abilities. To avoid being victim of these type of threats, organizations need to manage data access and should imply end-to-end encryption.
2. COVID-themed Attacks
COVID was the most discussed topic in the past year around the world and this was obviously noted by the hacker community.
Hackers and malicious actors always take the advantage of highly searched topics around the globe and often apply advanced social engineering techniques to implement their attacks. In the past year, around 25% of domains related to coronavirus are pointed to as malicious or fraudulent.
A huge amount of COVID-themed attacks were phishing emails, imitating government organizations, most prominent names among those organizations is the World Health Organization (WHO) or other national health authorities. According to a survey report, Google had daily around 20 million reported emails regarding COVID-19 fraud, scams and threats.
In order to mitigate such threats the best approach is to provide awareness training to your staff and employees, as they are the main vector that allows attackers to deploy malicious code or collect confidential informations. It also helps taking more security steps such as implementing two-factor authentication and strong passwords .
3. DevSecOps in the cloud
DevOps being the future of modern developments activities is seeking attention nowadays. The framework of DevOps is known as the SDLC framework; that is the core reason behind the success story of DevOps which is releasing a very high-quality software product with very low risk and waste processes. To adopt DevOps, it is necessary to have cloud-based automation and cloud-based infrastructure management solutions. This adaptation boosts the organization’s processes, speed, and security.
DevSecOps brings security and operations into the development process and helps ensure that everyone within an organization is responsible for security and compliance. Implementing DevSecOps means creating a “security as code” culture, where security is integrated with all phases of DevOps practices — keeping regulations and security top of mind while maintaining speed, agility and the innovation needed to stay ahead of attacks.
Conclusion
As the world is rapidly shifting to cloud technologies and due to COVID, the speed of adoption is doubled; this raise also bought a rise in security threats and new challenges to the cloud computing world.
Hence, we must take the necessary security steps to avoid upcoming data protection threats and challenges.