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New research has found a sharp correlation between cloud usage in Australia and the delivery of malware.
According to Australian research from cyber security firm Netskope, Aussies have fallen in love with the cloud. On average, we use 30 distinct cloud-based applications every day, compared to the global average of 22.
But this level of cloud adoption has led to Australia also leading the world when it comes to malware delivery via the cloud. It’s not a spot you generally want to be number one on.
Netskope looked at the anonymised data of “hundreds of thousands of Australian workers” to analyse their cloud habits between October 2022 and September 2023 and found that cloud-based malware delivery accounted for 64 per cent of all delivery methods in the country. The global average is 56 per cent.
The Australian figure dipped below the global average just once in that time frame, in November 2022. However, malware delivery via the cloud also peaked in February 2023, with cloud delivery accounting for 80 per cent of all delivery methods.
Ninety-seven per cent of all Australians monitored download or upload data to the cloud each month, a sign of the country’s rapid adoption of and reliance on the cloud.
As to the apps themselves being used for malware delivery, OneDrive leads with 19 per cent of malicious payloads, followed by Sharepoint with 18 per cent, and GitHub with 12 per cent. Weebly and Outlook.com fill out the top five, with a shade over 10 per cent of deliveries between them.
Ray Canzanese, director of the Netskope Threat Labs, feels that the high-profile data breaches of 2022 have put Australia on the map when it comes to being a useful target for hackers.
“The sharp increase in malware delivered via popular cloud apps from November 2022 is testament to this,” Canzanese said in a statement, “and shows how local businesses are having to defend against an onslaught of malware, many of which are coming from cloud ecosystems”.
“Unfortunately, legacy security technology, which is still used by a number of Australian organisations, is often blind to cloud ecosystems and unable to provide granular visibility and control over the data flowing to and from cloud applications,” Canzanese said. “Too many organisations also still create security exceptions for enterprise cloud applications such as OneDrive, which we know is the source of more malware downloads than any other cloud app. Cloud ecosystems have become a major potential source for cyber threats in 2023, and it is critical that organisations improve application and network monitoring and detection capabilities to include cloud use.”
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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