A Little More on Cloud Before Going Deeper on Ransomware

COVID-19 put organizations in a crunch. Throughout early- to mid-2020, they rushed to support remote work via cloud services and applications. That trend will keep enterprises at risk in 2021.

“The cloud is a new opportunity for attackers,” says Moritz Mann, CSO at Open Systems. “Cloud-based data and services are critical to business operations, and cloud services aggregate large populations of potential hacking victims.”

It’s not just outsiders, though.

“We predict that data breaches and exponential compromise in cloud infrastructures will be caused not by cloud providers but by misconfigurations and missteps of unwitting users,” says Trend Micro in its 2021 security predictions report, Turning the Tide.

Of course, to Open Systems’ observation, that doesn’t mean bad actors won’t have their heads in the cloud. Trend Micro concurs.

“Other concerns for cloud adopters are hackers attempting to take over cloud servers and deploy malicious container images,” Trend Micro notes. “We expect a sprawl of vulnerable images running in various architectures as users put unfettered trust in container services and depositories. These images will be aimed at hijacking repositories and poisoning resources. Exposed data will be a common pitfall that leads to cloud-based breaches and attacks in organizations.”