Office Documents Still Responsible for Nearly Half of All Malware
Cybersecurity firm Netskope published a new issue of its "Cloud and Threat" report and the document contained some interesting facts and numbers.
The quarterly report highlighted the acceleration of a trend that has been known for some time - malware delivery using cloud services and storage applications. According to the report, cloud storage apps accounted for over 66% of all malware delivered over the cloud.
Additionally, in the second quarter of 2021, the firm estimated that around 43% of the total volume of malware downloads took place using malware-laced Office documents. This is a dramatic uptick, given that the same figure was sitting at only 20% at the start of the global Covid pandemic back in 2020. The increase is even more impressive, considering the Emotet malware, which Europol called the "world's most dangerous malware", and the threat group behind it were taken down by international authorities in January 2021.
According to Netskope, the fact that malware delivery using Office documents is still booming indicates that there are other groups who stepped in to fill the spot vacated by Emotet and have started using methods and infection vectors similar to those used by Emotet.
Trailing Office documents, the next most successful malware delivery vehicle are collaborative development tools and applications - another field which is currently enjoying unprecedented popularity, largely driven by the Covid-enforced lockdowns and the massive shift in working practices. Over the first six months of 2021, Netskope has identified malware on a staggering 290 different cloud-based applications.
A surprising amount of work-related data is also stored in locations that are publicly accessible, including unsecured AWS buckets and MS Azure storage. Netskope believes around 35% of all cloud workload is exposed to the public internet.
Another issue highlighted in the report is that the overwhelming majority, around 97% of cloud apps that are adopted in businesses are "unmanaged and often freely adopted" by both individual units of the enterprise and individual users, essentially skipping monitoring, approval and regulation by the business's IT department.
