How Safe Are Cloud Applications?

Your favorite cloud applications may not be as secure as you'd think. Learn what you can do about it.

We currently live in an increasingly digital world where people work remotely more often. We want to have our information available from any location as long as we have internet, and as a result, tools like email and working in the cloud have become essential for us.

Cybercriminals are no strangers to this new reality, and to make a profit, they have set their sights on the cloud and carried out increasingly sophisticated attacks. So, are your cloud applications really safe? Let's find out.

Cloud Malware Is Very Common

According to Netskope's threat research, malware delivered by applications in the cloud is greater than that of websites, and most people are still unaware of this. In 2021, most malware downloads originated from cloud applications, which increased to 66% compared to 46% at the beginning of 2020. According to the same study, more than half of all managed cloud application instances were subject to credential attacks.

Cloud Applications Are Responsible for Many Data Breaches

The growing popularity of cloud applications has led to many cybercriminals attempting to access victims' cloud applications. These attacks are usually conducted through malicious cloud apps that deliver malware. Additionally, cloud app insiders have also caused data exfiltration, rising over the last few years.

More than half of managed cloud applications are currently being targeted by credential attacks, and this has dramatically increased corporate and personal data exfiltration in the cloud. This translates to one in seven workers being targeted by cybercriminals on the cloud.

What Can You Do to Protect Cloud Applications?

To adequately protect your cloud and its applications, you will need to secure its infrastructure yourself. In simple words, you must protect your cloud and data rather than the cloud applications; this way, even if a cloud application is malicious, your data and cloud infrastructure will be safe.

To protect yourself from all malicious apps in the cloud, use Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) software to implement security and compliance processes like malware detection, key management, and data loss prevention to protect your cloud from threats.

CASBs provide complete visibility into cloud application usage, including user information such as device and location and cloud risk assessments for each cloud service in use. CASBs also provide data security by implementing data loss prevention, collaboration control, access control, information rights management, encryption, and tokenization. A CASB is considered high-end security software used mainly by businesses and large organizations for these reasons.

A more conservative alternative to protect your cloud from malicious apps is downloading a cloud antivirus. Few people know what a cloud antivirus software is, but it could be a real lifesaver. Unlike traditional antivirus, a cloud antivirus will offload most of its tasks to a cloud server to minimize your system workload. Here are some additional tips that can help you secure your cloud from cloud applications:

1. Set Up Identity and Access Management

An identity and access management (IAM) system will ensure that only authorized users can access data and application functionality. Note that users don't necessarily mean individuals but viruses and the like. Additionally, IAM will protect your cloud overall (not just your applications and data) and improve the general security infrastructure of your systems and organization.

2. Encrypt Your Files and the Cloud

Encrypting the correct files in your cloud will optimize application performance while protecting your data from viruses and data breaches. There are three types of data encryption you should consider:

• Encryption in transit: This will encrypt communications between two services so unauthorized users cannot intercept data.
• Encryption at rest: This will ensure unauthorized parties will not read data while in storage in the cloud. This will be the most useful in preventing data breaches.
• Encryption in use: This will protect your data being processed by the cloud.

Encrypting your data will likely be one of the most practical steps to avoid the risk of a cloud application leaking data.

3. Conduct Threat Monitoring Through an Antivirus Software

As mentioned above, an antivirus is the first line of defense against all attacks. One of the main reasons for this is that an antivirus will help you achieve a high level of privacy and security by continuously monitoring cyber threats. However, this technique is only effective if you keep your antivirus software up to date with all the latest security patches.

4. Automated Security Testing

To achieve this, you must set your system to automatically scan for vulnerabilities to ensure that every new software you use is secure before being deployed to the cloud.

Why You Need Cloud Application Security

As we mentioned earlier, malware and other payloads delivered by cloud applications have increased dramatically in the last few years. Netskope's threat research identified the main trends in attacker activities in the cloud and compared them to 2020. One of the trends is that attackers are becoming more successful in delivering malware payloads to their victims.

The report found that more than two-thirds of malware downloads came from cloud apps in 2021, and Google Drive was the cloud app with the most malware downloads. The report also saw an increase in malicious Office documents, which indicates an increase in the security risks of cloud applications.

To fight these new threats, companies are applying modern security controls, and so should you. Some of the most popular cloud security technologies companies are using are identity and access management (IAM) software, cloud security posture management (CSPM) software, and security service edge (SSE)-driven architectures to allow users the freedom to move securely around the cloud.

So, How Safe Are These Cloud Apps?

It is not that cloud applications are more or less safe than the traditional ones. It simply means that cybercriminals are targeting them more since they are becoming more popular and are newer. As the world transition to using cloud servers over in-house servers, you must take proper precautions to secure your data.

Even though many cloud hosts take added precautions to secure their networks, their popularity of use has caused cybercriminals to increase attacks on servers and users. Additionally, as cybercriminals become more and more capable, cloud hosts can't seem to be able to keep up with threats, even the cloud hosts with increased security.