Cloud services have seen a 630% rise in cyber-attacks since the beginning of 2020. This comes as no surprise since many businesses turned to cloud services to maintain business continuity during the covid-19 pandemic. However, this means that hackers now have many new ways to access valuable information.
In this article, we’ll look at how the ransomware attack affects the cloud environment and how you can prevent it.
The Cloud is Vulnerable to Ransomware
Cloud computing offers a bundle of benefits such as excellent accessibility, low maintenance cost, unlimited storage capacity, and even built-in security. However, the cloud infrastructure is one that is extremely complex. And with anything complex, data security is always a challenge.
As ransomware attacks increase globally, cloud data is at a high risk of being hacked. The cloud environment, despite having significant data protection benefits, faces many vulnerabilities that could put your organization in danger.
Let us explore how ransomware in the cloud works.
How does cloud ransomware work?
There are three kinds of ransomware cloud attacks:
- Ransomware Syncing to Cloud Filesharing Devices
This type of ransomware attack hacks the cloud by infecting a local computer that is synced to the cloud. The data on this local device is first encrypted before the corruption subsequently spreads to the cloud infrastructure. This method is most commonly used by hackers to infect the cloud and encrypt important data required for business continuity.
- Ransomcloud Attacks
Ransomcloud attacks are a type of ransomware that targets cloud email services to gain access to the user’s email account. Once the threat actors have access, they use ransomware to encrypt the emails and demand a heavy ransom. Additionally, they might also orchestrate new attacks, and distribute more malware to the victim’s contacts.
- Ransomware attacks on the Cloud Service Provider
In this type of cloud ransomware, the attackers directly attack the cloud service provider. Since cloud technology is still under development, it has numerous vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit.
Impact of cloud ransomware attacks:
The consequences of ransomware attacks on your organization can be catastrophic. Let’s look at some of the most serious impacts of these attacks:
Economic impact:
The ransom payout isn’t the only cost a business suffers because of a ransomware attack. The costs include legal fees, forensics, fines and penalties, and data recovery expenses. Organizations also need to invest in better security systems and controls to avoid future attacks.
Business Continuity:
In addition to financial losses, companies also face significant difficulties in restoring normal business operations and functions after a devastating attack. Employees have reported a loss of important documents and login credentials. Moreover, employees lose their time to computer restarts and updates. Some of these outages last for a week or longer, disrupting workflow and degrading productivity.
Reputation and Customers:
These attacks cause severe reputational damage to organizations that fall victim to them. This leads to employees and customers losing trust in the company, which is harmful to the business.
Further, attackers delete backed-up data and steal sensitive data with cloud attacks. They may even threaten to release all the information to the public view if the ransom isn’t paid.
How Can You Protect Your Cloud Data from Ransomware?
- Multiple backups
Uploading your data to the cloud isn’t synonymous with a backup as the corruption from your local devices can easily spread to the cloud, making the files in the cloud inaccessible. Therefore, always keep multiple backups of your data for a speedy recovery from ransomware attacks. This ensures that you have multiple copies of data to fall back on in case your data is stolen. Additionally, you can’t be held hostage to pay the ransom amount. It is recommended to have two local backups and two cloud backups.
- Choose a reliable cloud service provider
While picking your cloud service provider, ensure that they have a ransomware recovery plan. They must be transparent about their security policies and must be willing to demonstrate their ransomware mitigation capabilities if required.
- Encrypt data
The most important part of your security strategy must be to ensure that sensitive information is inaccessible to hackers, even when it is stolen. Encryption does just this. It makes sensitive information useless to hackers.
- Use an intelligent WAF
Use an efficient Web Application Firewall to continuously monitor your cloud environment for lurking threats. AppTrana by Indusface is an intelligent and futuristic WAF that is equipped with critical components such Behavioural DDOS protection backed with machine learning concepts that can identify deviations in traffic tied to your application behaviour in real-time and backed with managed services team to ensure there is continuous tuning to ensure zero false positives and provide instant notifications and remediation plans.
- Recovery plan
While the above security measures greatly reduce the possibility of ransomware attacks, you could still fall prey to one. In the event that your organization does get hacked, you must have a disaster recovery plan in place. Plan how you will ensure business continuity without access to important data and how to ensure smooth operations after an attack.
- Cybersecurity awareness
Ransomware attacks commonly use social engineering to breach networks. Therefore, you must emphasize the importance of cybersecurity awareness in the workplace. Educate your employees about the warning signs of hacking attempts. Human errors can cost your company millions of dollars so do your best to minimize them.
Some more ransomware best practices:
In addition to the above-mentioned tips, here are some more security measures that can be taken to prevent ransomware attacks on the cloud:
- Deploy an anti-phishing monitoring solution to prevent phishing attacks that could subsequently lead to a ransomware attack
- Monitor and assess the third-party applications installed by your employees, such as Chrome extensions, marketplace apps, and any other apps that can access your cloud data
- Continuously update your operating systems and use the latest security patches
- Use a web filtering service to block infected/malicious websites
- In the case of an attack, immediately disconnect the corrupted local device from the rest of the network to avoid spreading of the ransomware
Conclusion
While cloud services empower businesses to be more efficient, they also expose valuable data to cyber-attacks in new ways. Ransomware attacks can wreck your cloud environment and in turn ruin your business. Therefore, cybersecurity is something every individual employee needs to be responsible for, and not just the IT teams. Secure your cloud assets with a reliable and expert security partner like Indusface.
