Cloud Malware Delivery Skyrockets in India, Exposing Organizations to Cyber Threats
Hyderabad: A research by Netskope, a leader in the secure access service edge (SASE) space, found attackers leveraging ‘strong cloud adoption’ to deliver malware to Indian workers and organisations via popular cloud applications.
Because of this, cloud malware delivery in India had nearly doubled from 33 per cent to 63 per cent in a year, beating the global rate, said Netskope, which provides a new model for cybersecurity and networking, providing end to end cloud security solutions.
The company launched it operations in Bengaluru on Thursday, to cater more to industry and expand its footprint in the public sector. Netskope has five data centres in India, one each at Hyderabad, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata.
Netskope studied anonymised usage of hundreds of thousands of Indian workers between May 2022 and April 30, 2023.
The report shows that an overwhelming majority of users included in Netskope’s analysis download data from the cloud on a monthly basis (92 per cent), and more than two in three upload data to those same applications (68 per cent), creating a huge amount of cloud traffic that organisations need to monitor.
"Attackers are always finding new ways to target Indian organisations, leveraging new tools and technologies such as cloud applications or generative AI tools, and our aim is to help Indian organisations stay ahead of bad actors in this cyber arms race," said Alok Kothari, managing director, Netkope India.
The most common malware detected by Netskope in India were trojans (63 per cent), which are commonly used by attackers to gain an initial foothold and deliver other types of malware, such as infostealers, remote access trojans, backdoors and ransomware.
Malicious actors were also exploiting this extensive cloud use to deliver malware via popular cloud business apps that many Indian workers use on a daily basis, like OneDrive, Gmail, Weebly, Github, Sharepoint and Google Drive, leading the ranking of the top cloud apps abused for malware download in India.
Abusing cloud apps for malware delivery enables attackers to evade security controls that rely primarily on domain block lists and URL filtering, or that do nor inspect cloud traffic," Netskope found.
