Over half of organizations suffer cyberattacks in the cloud

A new report reveals that 53 percent of organizations have experienced a cyberattack on their cloud infrastructure within the last 12 months.

The 2022 Cloud Security Report from Netwrix shows that was the most common type of attack, experienced by 73 percent of respondents.

The average detection time for most types of attacks has also increased since 2020. The most significant slowdown has been for supply chain compromise, in 2020, 76 percent of respondents spotted this type of attack within minutes or hours, but in 2022, only 47 percent found it that quickly. Ransomware became harder to uncover as well, 86 percent of organizations needed minutes or hours to detect ransomware in 2020, but in 2022, this share dropped to 74 percent.

"Attacks are maturing faster than the expertise, tools and processes defending against them. Organizations are implementing more security controls and spending more money to stay safe -- 49 percent confirmed their cloud security budget increased in 2022," says Dirk Schrader, VP of security research at Netwrix. "But more tools doesn't always mean more security. Point solutions from different vendors operate separately, offer overlapping or conflicting functionality, and require organizations to deal with multiple support teams. This complexity leads to security gaps. One way to solve this problem is to build a security architecture with a select, smaller group of trusted vendors that develop, offer, and support an extensive portfolio of solutions."

Breaches are becoming costlier too. This year, 49 percent of respondents say that an attack led to unplanned expenses to fix security gaps, up from 28 percent in 2020. The share who faced compliance fines more than doubled (from 11 percent to 25 percent), as did the number who saw their company valuation drop (from seven percent to 17 percent).

Schrader adds, "The report reveals that cloud adoption is in full swing: Organizations report that 41 percent of their workloads are already in the cloud, and they expect that share to increase to 54 percent by the end of 2023. IT teams are learning how to use the cloud both efficiently and securely as well as train their fellow colleagues similarly. It is time to pay closer attention to security measures that improve the ability to identify, protect against, detect, and respond to threats, in order to reduce both the likelihood and impact of a breach."

The full report is available on the Netwrix site.

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