Around two in five (39%) businesses experienced a data breach in their cloud environment in 2022, a rise of 4% compared with 2021, a new report has found.
The 2023 Thales Global Cloud Security Study, which surveyed nearly 3000 IT and security professionals across 18 countries, also revealed a dramatic increase in sensitive data stored in the cloud in 2022 compared to the previous year. Three-quarters (75%) of respondents said that more than 40% of data stored in their organizations’ cloud environments was ‘sensitive.’ This compared to 39% of businesses in 2021.
Targeting the Human Factor
The leading cause of cloud data breaches was human error, at 55%, according to the report. This was significantly above the next highest factor identified by respondents (21%), which was exploitation of vulnerabilities.
The targeting of users to infiltrate cloud networks is also a trend being observed by cybersecurity company Proofpoint. Matt Cooke, Cybersecurity Strategist at Proofpoint told Infosecurity: “Attackers realize that people and their accounts are still the vulnerability. And it actually doesn’t matter now where that person is because everyone’s pretty much using the same tools. For example, everyone’s got a Microsoft 365 account.”
Proofpoint’s 2023 Human Factor report found that 94% of monitored cloud tenants were targeted by either precision or brute-force attacks in any given month. Of these tenants, 62% were successfully attacked.
“From an attacker’s perspective, if you’ve got a list of usernames and passwords and you think they might belong to a particular company, why would you not try them against those accounts? We see that going on quite significantly,” commented Cooke.
App-Based Threats
The Thales report highlighted a 41% rise in SaaS usage from 2021 to 2023, with these applications increasingly replacing on-premises application functionality. Over half of cyber professionals (55%) said this expansion has made it more complex to secure data in the cloud.
Additionally, the respondents ranked SaaS apps as the most targeted area for attacks (38%) in 2022, followed by cloud storage (36%).
Proofpoint’s Cooke also highlighted apps as a key area in cloud security. He outlined a growing trend of malicious third-party applications being connected to organizations’ cloud accounts. Here, attackers trick users into granting permissions to malicious OAuth apps, giving them access to the user’s legitimate cloud services.
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