As more and more firms choose to store their data in the cloud, it seems India has emerged as a top victim when it comes to breaches to public cloud security.

According to a survey, about 93 per cent of organisations in India experienced a public cloud security incident last year. While 53 per cent of them suffered ransomware attacks, 49 per cent reported malware incidents and 49 per cent experienced exposure of data incidents.

As many as 48 per cent of the organisations reported compromised accounts and 36 per cent reported crytpjacking.

The State of Cloud Security 2020 report, commissioned by cyber security solutions company Sophos, surveyed 3,500 IT managers across 26 countries. Of these, 227 respondents are from India.

Ransomware is one of the most widely reported cybercrimes in the public cloud. The most successful ransomware attacks include data in the public cloud.

“Attackers are shifting their methods to target cloud environments that cripple necessary infrastructure and increase the likelihood of payment,” Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos, said.

“The recent increase in remote working provides extra motivation to disable cloud infrastructure that is being relied on more than ever. It’s worrisome that many organisations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads,” he said.

Cloud security, he contends, is a shared responsibility, and organisations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers.

The survey finds that more than one in two (55 per cent) of Indian businesses reported cybercriminals gaining access through stolen cloud provider account credentials.

Concerns

The survey found that detection and response are the primary cloud security concerns for Indian IT managers.

Meanwhile, Europeans seem to have suffered the lowest percentage of security incidents in the cloud. This is an indicator that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines is helping protect organisations from being compromised.

The challenges

The report said that 44 per cent of all the attacks on Indian organisations happened after hackers exploited misconfigurations.

Cyber criminals also gain access through stolen cloud provider account credentials.

An interesting finding from the survey is that almost all the respondents expressed concern over their current level of cloud security.

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