Public Cloud security incidents hit India the hardest in the last year with 93 percent of the country’s organizations experiencing such an issue, said a survey of 26 nations by cybersecurity company Sophos on Monday.
The cybersecurity incidents that Indian organizations suffered most included ransomware (53 percent) and other malware (49 percent), exposed data (49 percent), compromised accounts (48 percent), and crypto-jacking (36 percent), said the report titled “The State of Cloud Security 2020”
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 organizations from being compromised.
India is yet to enforce a data protection law.
“Ransomware, not surprisingly, is one of the most widely reported cybercrimes in the public Cloud,” Chester Wisniewski, Principal Research Scientist at Sophos said in a statement.
“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 organizations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing Cloud data and workloads,” Wisniewski said.
“Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organizations need to carefully manage and monitor Cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers.”
Accidental exposure continues to plague organizations, with misconfigurations exploited in 44 percent of reported attacks on Indian organizations.
Additionally, more than 55 percent of Indian businesses reported that cybercriminals gained access through stolen Cloud provider account credentials, said the report.
Despite this, only 29 percent said managing access to Cloud accounts is a top area of concern.
With 76 percent of organizations using the public Cloud, detection and response are leading Cloud security concerns for Indian IT managers while data security remains a top concern globally for businesses.
The report is based on an independent survey involving 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.
