Unspecified Cyber Attacks Affect Nearly Half of Companies Worldwide
In the latest Thales Cloud Security report, a concerning trend has emerged: a significant rise in cloud data breaches. According to the study, 54% of organisations worldwide have experienced a cloud data breach in the past 12 months, a seven-point increase compared to the 2023 report.
The report identifies human error and misconfigurations as the top root cause of cloud breaches, occurring in 31% of cases. Failure to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) was another significant cause, identified in 17% of cases. Exploitation of known vulnerabilities was the next highest root cause, at 28%, while exploitation of previously unknown vulnerabilities/zero days accounted for 24% of breaches.
Data sovereignty and privacy have emerged as top concerns in this year's report. Nearly half (47%) of corporate data held in the cloud is sensitive, yet less than 10% of enterprises have encrypted 80% or more of their cloud data. The complexity of managing encrypted content in cloud environments challenges 53% of respondents, who use five or more key management systems.
The report also highlights the growing use of cloud services. Over two-thirds (66%) of organisations use more than 25 SaaS applications, and the biggest cloud targets cited by respondents were SaaS applications (31%), cloud storage (30%), and cloud management infrastructure (26%).
Cloud security was the top category of security spending, reported by 33% of all respondents. Of those who identified cloud management infrastructure as a target, 72% identified underlying infrastructure compromise as a target of increasing attacks.
Sebastien Cano, Senior Vice President for Cloud Protection and Licensing activities at Thales, commented on the scalability and flexibility of the cloud but emphasised the need to manage data, keys, and access in cloud environments. He stated, "The cloud offers unparalleled scalability and flexibility, but it also presents new challenges in terms of data, key, and access management. It is crucial that organisations prioritise these aspects to ensure their data is secure in the cloud."
The study also reveals that 65% of respondents identified cloud security as a current concern. It is clear that as organisations continue to move their data to the cloud, the need for robust cloud security measures will only increase.
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