Cloud-based safety threats are rising at a sooner fee than ever, as risk actors discover new and progressive methods to push malware (opens in new tab) by way of the novel expertise.
Netskope’s newest Cloud & Menace Report: World Cloud and Internet Malware Developments paper discovered greater than half (55%) of all HTTP and HTTPS malware downloads got here from cloud apps, up from 35% for a similar interval a yr earlier than.
That makes it greater than a 50% leap year-on-year.
Malicious apps multiplying
The rise is because of a rise in folks downloading malware from fashionable enterprise cloud functions, Netskope additional claims. Microsoft’s OneDrive is seen as the most well-liked enterprise app “by a large margin”. Moreover, the variety of functions with malware downloads additionally continued rising, with Netskope figuring out 261 totally different malicious apps in Q1 this yr.
To make issues worse, malware delivered over what’s thought-about “dangerous internet classes” makes up however a tiny portion of whole internet malware downloads, with the vast majority of the downloads being unfold out over totally different websites. Content material supply networks (CDNs) are literally used probably the most, with a market share of seven.7%.
Generally, 5 in 1,000 enterprise customers tried to obtain malware in Q1 2023, with new variants taking on nearly three-quarters (72%) of these downloads. What’s extra, nearly 10% of all downloads began with a search engine question, as risk actors weaponize information voids and web optimization poisoning for queries which have only a few outcomes. “This represents simply certainly one of many social engineering methods that attackers are accelerating,” the researchers say.
Lastly, social engineering reigns supreme as the important thing malware supply approach with electronic mail, collaboration apps, and chat apps, are being leveraged to trick folks into downloading malware. Trojans are the most well-liked malware sort with 60% of all downloads. Phishing downloads took up 13%.
