The top items on today’s boardroom agenda now are risk management and cybersecurity. As long as we go by facts, a Gartner survey stated that about sixty-one percent of chief information officers (CIOs) aim to boost business investment in network and cybersecurity, thanks to the outrage of high-level cyber attacks. By the end of this year, according to the global research and advisory firm, spending on information security and risk management technology and services will rise by 12.4%. The fact that businesses began appointing cyber security specialists directly to the board is even more telling.
Cloud adoption has increased as a result of the emergence of the hybrid workplace and the urgent need to transition to digital business models. We must understand that it’s extremely crucial to leverage cloud security and that a top-notch one, for businesses to have a safe and secure journey, and the process becomes highly sustainable, agile, and resilient. In addition to keeping business operations and data secure, being far more intellectual also means outsmarting the most skilled fraudsters.
Let’s get started with a short yet crisp introduction of a cloud attack.
Cloud Attack: A Brief Introduction
Before anything else, it’s critical to comprehend what a cloud cybercrime entails. The term “cloud cyber attack” refers to any cyberattack that targets remote service providers that provide hosting, computer technology, or data storage services through their cloud infrastructure. This includes assaults on platforms for services that use SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS as service delivery models.
Now, we’ll discuss the greatest cloud attacks that have taken place in the past few years.
Greatest Cloud Attacks in Recent Years
On proper research, we found the following to be the most impactful cloud attacks in recent years.
- CAM4 (2020)
The cloud cyber-attack that exposed 10.8 billion sensitive entries, or 7 TB of data, on the adult live streaming website CAM4 in March 2020. The compromised database contained user names, payment logs, usernames, email addresses, and location information.
- Advanced Info Service (2020)
Justin Paine, a cybersecurity researcher, was searching BinaryEdge and Shodan when he came across the AIS data breach. As far as the actual reports as per Paine go, the customers of AWN (a Thailand-based telecom enterprise) were represented by a whopping 8.3 billion DNS query and network flow logs in the leaked or stolen database
- Keepnet Labs (2020)
It was among the most noteworthy data breaches in the year 2020. This cloud attack included a leaking ElasticSearch database. It included entries that had been exposed earlier throughout the globe by manifold data breaches. To everyone’s surprise, there were two data collections in the database with a whopping 15 million and 5 billion entries.
Now, finally, we discuss the steps to protect the cloud from cyber attacks.
Top 3 Ways to Protect Cloud from Cyber Attacks
Here are the ways you must follow to protect your cloud platform from cyber attacks:
End-to-End Security Monitoring Should be a Priority
Gone are those days when a measly antivirus software or any online security procedure was sufficient enough to protect a company from major cyber (or cloud) attacks or highly technical security breaches. It is virtually impossible to achieve the proper visibility without a knowledgeable team and the appropriate technology stack, and efficiency cannot exist without visibility.
Businesses today need three things to secure end-to-end security measures: a monitoring system that’s credible and reliable, a robust cybercrime intelligence, and a top-notch tech stack that can be conveniently leveraged for detection and containment activities. To determine whether a particular indicator or activity is suspicious, it also includes threat modeling based on real-world threat intelligence.
Vulnerability Management Through a Risk-Driven Path
When you compare the perceived threat to the actual threat, there is a tendency to give zero-day vulnerabilities and basic vulnerability scanning processes more attention than they merit. Although important metrics, zero-day vulnerabilities are not the primary concern for the majority of organizations.
Businesses can locate areas with real threats by using a risk-based approach to vulnerability management. Based on how easily a threat can be exploited and turned against a company, this method ranks and ranks threats. It enables the removal of vulnerabilities or the implementation of controls for those that could be abused by immediate threats specific to the current IT environment.
Visualizing the attacks in a real-life exploitation index that illustrates how well the dangers are pertinent in the corporate environment and relying on the applications state is a good practice. Nearly every exploit has prerequisites that will restrict its applicability level and, as a result, its risk score or impact.
Create a privileged identity and access management concept.
To stop data leaks and breaches, it’s essential to assign and manage access to company data. Businesses require a specialized approach to managing privileged identities and access that incorporates the following features: identity detachment of responsibilities, roles, and approvals; highly specialized surveillance for privileged access, particularly for customer environments; and direct integrations with the security monitoring system.
Final Words
With this, we come to the end of this article. To summarize what we discussed, we learned about cloud attacks, some of the most notable cloud attacks in recent years, and finally some very crucial steps to ensure that the cloud environment is free from these terrible cyber attacks.
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