Half of malware in Australia now delivered by the cloud

Cybercriminals are exploiting the cloud to deliver malware, with Australia seeing one of the world’s largest increases in the proportion of malware delivered over the cloud, new research from Netskope estimates.

A new report from the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) vendor found that in Australia, 50% of malware is being delivered over the cloud, up from 40% in 2021.

Globally, analysis for the report found over 400 distinct cloud applications delivering malware in 2022, nearly triple the amount seen in 2021. The cloud has become the predominant method for delivering malware in industries including telecom (81%), retail (57%) and health care (54%), Netskope said.

Meanwhile, the ongoing popularity of hybrid and remote work has resulted in new security challenges for businesses, the report found. In Australia, the ratio of the number of users on the Netskope platform to the number of network locations from which those users’ traffic originates was close to 60% in 2021.

Netskope Threat Labs Threat Research Director Ray Canzanese said these findings underscore the importance of managing all traffic reaching the enterprise network.

“Attackers are increasingly abusing business-critical cloud apps to deliver malware by bypassing inadequate security controls,” he said.

“That is why it is imperative that more organisations inspect all HTTP and HTTPS traffic, including traffic for popular cloud apps, both company and personal instances, for malicious content.”

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