Cybersecurity firm Sophos reveals that 82% of companies in the Philippines have experienced public cloud cybersecurity incidents last year. According to the cybersecurity company’s latest “The State of the Cloud Security 2020” global survey, ransomware (77%) is one of the widely reported cybercrimes in the public cloud.

Other cybersecurity incidents found in the report include exposed data (40%), compromised accounts (40%), and cryptojacking (16%). Globally, organizations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50% more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.

The State of Cloud Security 2020 report highlights findings of an independent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne among more than 3,500 IT managers across 26 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa that currently host data and workloads in the public cloud.

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“The recent increase in remote working provides extra motivation to ​disable cloud infrastructure that is being relied on more than ever, so it’s worrisome that many organizations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads,” said Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos. “Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organizations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers.

Attackers break-in

Accidental exposure continues to plague organizations, with misconfigurations exploited in 71% of reported attacks in the Philippines. Detailed in the “SophosLabs 2020 Threat Report,” misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities.

Also, 27% of Philippine organizations report that cybercriminals gained access through stolen cloud provider account credentials. Despite this, less than half (32%) of organizations say managing access to cloud accounts is a top area of concern. Data from Sophos Cloud Optix, a cloud security posture management tool, further reveals that 91% of global accounts have overprivileged identity and access management roles, and 98% have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.

Silver lining

All Philippine respondents (100%) admit to concern about their current level of cloud security, while more than half (58%) of the respondents understood that the security of an organization is a shared responsibility among organizations, partners, and vendors. These are encouraging signs that security is top of mind. Identifying and responding to security incidents top the list of security concerns for 39% of respondents; staying compliant with relevant regulations, as well as a lack of visibility into infrastructure both come a close equal second (34%).