A survey report by cyber-security firm, Sophos, tagged: ‘The State of Cloud Security 2020,’ has estimated that over 86 per cent of organisations from Nigeria experienced a public cloud security incident last year.
This included ransomware at 34 per cent, other malware at 43 per cent, exposed data at 57 per cent, compromised accounts at 46 per cent and cryptojacking at 26 per cent.
According to the report, globally, organisations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50 per cent more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.
The report stated that Europeans suffered the lowest percentage of security incidents in the cloud, an indicator that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines are helping to protect organisations from being compromised, adding that India, on the other hand, fared the worst, with 93 per cent of organisations being hit by an attack in the last year.
Analysing the report, the Principal Research Scientist at Sophos, Chester Wisniewski, said: “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.
“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 organisations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads. Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organisations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers.”
According to SophosLabs 2020 Threat Report, misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities. The report said, despite this, only around 25 per cent of organisations from Nigeria say lack of staff expertise is a top area of concern.
Data from Sophos Cloud Optix, a cloud security posture management tool, further reveals that globally 91 per cent of accounts have over privileged identity and access management roles, and 98 per cent have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.
The report stated that nearly all respondents 97 per cent from Nigeria admit to concern about their current level of cloud security, an encouraging sign that it’s top of mind and important, adding that identifying and responding to security incidents tops the list of security concerns for nearly half of respondents, followed by managing access to cloud accounts and data leaks.
