Special Feature: Cloud security
Cloud computing in the Covid-19 era
Threats and solutions McAfee: There’s a correlation between rising cloud usage and increasing cloud-focused cybercrime events.
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n its “Cloud Adoption & Risk Report – Work from Home Edition”, published on businesswire.com on 27 May this year, global cybersecurity expert McAfee says there’s a definite correlation between the pandemic-driven increased use of cloud services and a rise in cloudfocused cybercrime. It’s a “significant and potentially longlasting trend” that emphasises the need to tighten cyber security in the new normal “work-from-home environment”, it warns. “While we are seeing a tremendous amount of courage and global goodwill to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic, we also are unfortunately seeing an increase in bad actors looking to exploit the sudden uptick
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Security Focus africa June 2020
in cloud adoption created by an increase in working from home,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of Cloud Security at McAfee, adding: “The risk of threat actors targeting the cloud far outweighs the risk brought on by changes in employee behavior.” McAfee’s research shows that in the last few months, the use of cloud services spiked by 50 per cent in certain industries, that take-up of cloud collaboration tools increased by close to 600 per cent in the education sector and that “threat events from external actors increased by 630 per cent over the same period. “Most of these external attacks targeted collaboration services like Microsoft 365, and were large-scale attempts to access cloud accounts with stolen credentials. Access to the cloud by unmanaged, personal devices doubled, adding another layer of risk for security professionals working to keep their data secure in the cloud,” he said.
Microsoft: A rapidly evolving world of threats It’s a “rapidly evolving world of mobile threats” says Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 Security, in a recent blog. “One of the biggest and fastest growing threats on mobile is phishing attacks, the majority of which happen outside of email, such as via phishing sites, messaging apps, games, and other applications, and are tricky to spot on smaller form factors. Other common mobile threats include malicious applications that users are lured into downloading, as well as increased risk introduced by rooted devices that may allow unnecessary escalated privileges and the installation of unauthorised applications.”
Thales: The challenges of a multi-cloud world Before the Covid-19 crisis, says Tina Stewart, vice president of Global Market Strategy at the Thales Group, IT professionals and their support staff generally operated either
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