7 in 10 organisations fell victim to public cloud security incidents

All Singapore firms surveyed are concerned about current levels of cloud security.

Nearly three quarters or 71% of Singapore organisations experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year, according to a survey by cybersecurity leader Sophos. These incidents include ransomware and other malware (66%), exposed data (30%), compromised accounts (19%), and cryptojacking (13%).

Hundred percent of the Singapore respondents surveyed admitted to be concerned about their current level of cloud security. Appropriately, identifying and re  sponding to security incidents top the list of security concerns for nearly more than half (51%) of respondents in Singapore, whilst data leaks is a close second with 50%.

Sophos notes that globally, organisations running multi-cloud environments are 50% more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.

Sophos’ principal research scientist Chester Wisniewski notes that ransomware is one of the most widely reported cybercrimes in the public cloud.

“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,” he added.

Furthermore, accidental exposure continues to plague organisations, with misconfigurations exploited in 66% of reported attacks. According to SophosLabs 2020 Threat Report, misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities.

Additionally, 37% of Singapore organisations reported that cybercriminals gained access through stolen cloud provider account credentials. Despite this, less than a quarter of organisations say managing access to cloud accounts is a top area of concern.

In addition, 91% of accounts globally have over privileged identity and access management roles, whilst 98% have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.