Technology

Securing the cloud

As cloud adoption accelerates, organisations are starting to find business-critical data and services being scattered across clouds and datacentres, which leads to an expanded attack surface and a corresponding increase in security risk.

28 December 2020

What are the top threats associated with cloud? According to Paul Williams, Fortinet country manager Southern Africa, distributed denial-of- service (DDoS) attacks have been growing in popularity. “Attackers use DDoS attacks to overwhelm a website’s server so it does not have the capacity to respond to user requests. This could render the site useless for long periods of time. Also, data can be lost from the cloud for a variety of reasons, like an accident or natural disaster. Not only do cloud security solutions help keep thieves out, but they can also include measures to protect data from unexpected events. These events can be proactively scanned and caught, with the right alert information being sent in real-time to the security operations centre and combat the breach taking place. Data on the cloud can be a slow-moving target for the right hacker if it’s not secured. Some steal data to exploit members of an organisation, while others sell it to entities wishing to know a company’s secrets.”

Security threats are constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated, and cloud computing is no less at risk than an onpremise environment, adds Elaine Wang, cloud and software solutions director at Rectron. “With so many organisations now operating in cloud-based environments, information accessibility has never been higher. As enterprises expand their digital footprint, cybercriminals can locate new points to exploit, gaining access to private records and other sensitive data. Malware injection is a common risk. Attackers upload these malicious scripts of code to a cloud server that hosts various applications and services. Account hijacking and stolen and compromised account login credentials are also a common threat to cloud computing. Hackers use sophisticated tools and phishing schemes to hijack cloud accounts, impersonate authorised users, and gain access to sensitive business data. Given the increasing incidences of account hijacking, training programmes to educate staff about cyber security are becoming increasingly important.”

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