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Rising attack levels in the cloud

Recent research shows that cybercriminals are increasingly leaving traditional targets behind and opting to infect more profitable platforms, namely, the cloud.

In the current business landscape, the cloud is nothing new. Organizations leverage Web-based resources on a daily basis, and will continue to do so until the next best thing arrives. However, this is no secret to hackers, who are more often aiming to infiltrate these assets due to their boosted profitability and value on the black market.

These findings are echoed by a recent Alert Logic report, which noted that there has been a sharp increase recently in the number of attacks on the cloud, including within brute force and vulnerability scan approaches, PCWorld reported. In comparison with previous study results, the amount of cloud brute force attacks rose by 14 percent, with vulnerability scans also increasing by 17 percent.

Malware found in service provider cloud
The increasing instances of cloud malware infections are not unique to individual users. According to CSO contributor Antone Gonsalves, a Web service provider recently discovered a malware sample in its cloud environment after offering services to a customer. The infection came as the result of a vulnerability scan, which illuminated unpatched weaknesses in the cloud platform.

Because the operating system had not been updated for a number of years, the technology could contain 300 different vulnerabilities that had been previously flagged and patched.

How to protect the cloud against malware
However, this is just one example of malware infection present in a cloud environment. As users continue to rely more and more on Web-based services, the platform will become increasingly attractive to hackers, echoing Alert Logic's findings.

"The key takeaway from this report is that businesses and individuals need to recognize the risks cloud applications and data are exposed to and be aware of the security threats that exist," wrote PCWorld contributor Tony Bradley.

There are a few best practices users can leverage to safeguard their cloud environments and stave off malware infection. For starters, administrators can set up protection measures to shrink the scope of data access, suggested IT Business Edge. In this way, only pre-approved users with the correct account credentials can connect with resources stored in the cloud.

Decision makers should also seek to deploy encryption of sensitive company information in the cloud. An SSL certificate gleaned from a trusted certificate authority can provide this protection, which makes content unaccessible to individuals not in possession of the decryption key. In this way, even if hackers were able to bypass the authentication security level, any materials they might access would appear scrambled.

Protect data in transit with an SSL certificate today.

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