Survey: 70% of Organizations Suffer Public Cloud Security Incidents

According to The State of Cloud Security 2020, a global survey from next-generation cybersecurity leader Sophos, nearly three quarters (70%) of organizations experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year – including ransomware and other malware (50%), exposed data (29%), compromised accounts (25%), and cryptojacking (17%). Organizations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50% more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.

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 organizations from being compromised. India, on the other hand, fared the worst, with 93% of organizations being hit by an attack in the last year.

“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,” said Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at Sophos. “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.”

Accidental exposure continues to plague organizations, with misconfigurations exploited in 66% of reported attacks.

One-third of respondents reported that cybercriminals gained access through stolen cloud provider account credentials. Despite this, only a quarter of organizations say managing access to cloud accounts is a top area of concern. The company also stated that 91% of accounts have overprivileged identity and access management roles, and 98% have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.

The Sophos State of Cloud Security 2020 report highlights findings of an independent survey of 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.

Channel Impact^®
The report cites interesting data that underscores potential opportunity for channel partners.