Increased cloud adoption has promoted cyber attackers to target cloud environments with attacks now reaching near-equivalent to on-premises environments, according to a new report.
According to a report Alert Logic, based on a survey of 2,200 customers, brute force attacks increased from 30% to 44% in cloud environment while vulnerability scans increased from 27% to 44%.
During the past year, about 49% of the on-premises data centres experienced brute-force attacks while 44% of the cloud providers suffered attack.
Cloud centres witnessed mostly web applications attacks ranging between 44% to 31%.
Alert Logic Chief Security Evangelist Stephen Coty said the intelligence suggests that the observed increase in cloud attacks is correlated to the growth of cloud adoption in the enterprise.
"As more enterprise workloads have moved into cloud and hosted infrastructures, some traditional on-premises threats have followed them," Coty said.
"This reinforces the necessity for enterprise-grade security solutions specifically designed to protect cloud environments."
European region witnessed highest volume of attacks where honeypots experienced four times the number of attacks compared to the US.
About 14% of malware collected through the honeypots was considered undetectable by 51 of the world’s top antivirus vendors.
For the analysis Alert Logic used a honeypot is a decoy system which was configured to be intentionally vulnerable, to gather information about attackers and their exploitation methods.
The research carried out between 1st April and 30 September, 2013 recorded more than one billion security events and verified more than 232,364 security incidents as valid threats.
