Bad actors exploit the sudden increase in use of Zoom, WebEx and Teams

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• Bad actors exploit the sudden increase in use of Zoom, WebEx and Teams

McAfee found an exponential increase in threats to cloud services correlated with the increase in cloud usage between January and April 2020. External attacks on cloud accounts increased 630% from January to April and saw a significant increase in cyberattacks targeting cloud tools like Zoom, WebEx, and Teams, organizations that primarily work at home. Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack experienced up to 600% increases in education-led usage during the Covid-19 pandemic. Overall, enterprise uptake of cloud services has increased by 50%, even in industries like manufacturing and financial services that typically rely on existing on-premises applications, networking, and security more than others. "While we are seeing a great deal of global courage and goodwill to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic, we are unfortunately also seeing an increase in the number of bad actors seeking to exploit the surge in cloud adoption created by an increase in working from home," said Rajiv Gupta, McAfee's executive vice president of cloud security.

New security delivery models are needed

(Image credit: McAfee)

(Image credit: McAfee) Gupta said the risk of threat actors targeting the cloud far outweighs the risk of changing employee behavior. Mitigating this risk requires cloud-native security solutions that can detect and prevent external attacks and data loss from the cloud and the use of unmanaged devices, she said. that cloud-native security must be deployed and managed remotely and cannot add any friction to employees whose work is essential to the health of your organization. In addition, he said the attack patterns underscore the need for new models to provide security in the distributed home work environment of today and likely the future. With cloud-native threats on the rise as the cloud takes over, he said all industries need to assess their security posture to guard against data recovery and exfiltration. "Businesses need to guard against players trying to exploit weaknesses in their cloud implementations," she said.