The shift to remote work in 2020 forced many organisations to rely more heavily on the cloud, but with this shift came more opportunities for cybercriminals to do their jobs.
McAfee found nearly 3.1 million external attacks on cloud user accounts in 2020.
Thailand recorded the highest number of attacks in the second quarter alone, with more than 600,000, and the second highest number in the third and fourth quarters of 2020, with around 500,000. India was in second place, with 375,000 attacks in the second half of 2020. The US was among the least affected countries on the list.
Information about cloud-based attacks was obtained from more than 30 million McAfee customers across all major industries from healthcare to real estate to manufacturing.
Phishing attacks have increased by 605% in the second quarter of 2020, 240% and 114% respectively in the third and fourth quarters.
Ransomware attacks increased by 69% in the second half of 2020, with REvil, Thanos, Ryuk, RansomeXX and Maze being the top ransomware families.
Mobile malware grew by 118% in the last quarter of 2020, while MacOS malware grew by 420% in the third quarter. PowerShell threats grew by 208% in the fourth quarter. These attacks attempted to infiltrate malicious code into legitimate running processes.
Overall, McAfee found an average of 588 threats per minute in the third quarter and 648 threats per minute in the last quarter.
To counter these threats, organizations and employees are reminded to always backup, keep software up to date, implement network segmentation, and always use very good endpoint security software.
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