Business organisations in Nigeria have been identified as one of the hardest hit by public cloud cyber security breaches, as more than eight out of ten Nigerian organisations experienced a public cloud security incident in the last one year.
A recently released global survey by Sophos, a British security software and hardware company, revealed that 86 percent of organisations suffered – including 34 percent ransomware, 43 percent of other malware, 57 percent of exposed data, 46 percent of compromises accounts and 26 percent cryptojacking between 2019 and 2020.
The state of cloud security 2020 report which highlights findings of an independent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne among more than 3,500 IT managers across 26 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa that currently host data and workloads in the public cloud, shows that globally, organisations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50 percent more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.
According to the report, Europeans suffered the lowest percentage of security incidents in the cloud, an indicator that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines are helping to protect organisations from being compromised.
India, on the other hand, fared the worst, with 93 percent of organisations being hit by an attack in the last year.
“Ransomware, not surprisingly, is one of the most widely reported cybercrimes in the public cloud. The most successful ransomware attacks include data in the public cloud, according to the State of Ransomware 2020 report, and 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, so it’s worrisome that many organisations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads. Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organisations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers,” he said.
The unintentional open door: How attackers break in
Accidental exposure continues to plague organisations, with misconfigurations exploited in 64 percent of reported attacks in Nigeria.
Detailed in the SophosLabs 2020 threat report, misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities. Despite this, only around a quarter of organisations (25 percent) from Nigeria say lack of staff expertise is a top area of concern.
Data from a cloud security posture management tool further reveals that globally 91 percent of accounts have over privileged identity and access management roles, and 98 percent have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.
The Silver Lining
Nearly all respondents (97 percent) from Nigeria admit to concern about their current level of cloud security, an encouraging sign that it’s top of mind and important. Appropriately, “Identifying and responding to security incidents” tops the list of security concerns for nearly half of respondents (45 percent) followed by “managing access to cloud accounts” and “data leaks” (32 percent and 32 percent respectively). Interestingly only 54 percent of respondent from Nigeria say they have full awareness of their cloud assets and 22 percent say they are aware of only a minority.
