Cloud-based services are augmenting business operations and being adopted at a record pace. In fact, ​Gartner® estimates “more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025 and will not be able to fully execute on their digital strategies without the use of cloud-native architectures and technologies.”

The CrowdStrike eBook, “Protectors of the Cloud: Combating the Rise in Threats to Cloud Environments,” reveals how adversaries target and infiltrate cloud environments and recommends best practices for defense. As organizations move critical applications and data to the cloud, these resources have come under increasing attack.

Today CrowdStrike sent the following Tech Alert to our customers: On July 8, 2022, CrowdStrike Intelligence identified a callback phishing campaign impersonating prominent cybersecurity companies, including CrowdStrike. The phishing email implies the recipient’s company has been breached and insists the victim call the included phone number.

At CrowdStrike, we combine cloud scale with machine learning expertise to improve the efficacy of our machine learning models. One method for achieving that involves scanning massive numbers of files that we may not even have in our sample collections before we release our machine learning models. This prerelease scan allows us to maximize the efficacy of our machine learning models while minimizing negative impact of new or updated model releases.

Cybercriminals are constantly evolving their operations, the methods they use to breach an organization’s defenses and their tactics for monetizing their efforts. In the CrowdStrike 2022 Global Threat Report, we examined how the frequency and sophistication of ransomware attacks has grown in the past year.

The threat presented by today’s adversaries is as pervasive as it is dangerous — eCrime and state-nexus actors alike are attempting to infiltrate companies and organizations of all sizes and across all verticals. While technology is a powerful tool for performing routine or repeatable analysis, the only way to effectively hunt and contain sophisticated and determined cyber threat actors is to use the expertise and ingenuity of human threat hunters.

Adversaries often exploit legacy protocols like Windows NTLM that unfortunately remain widely deployed despite known vulnerabilities. Previous CrowdStrike blog posts have covered critical vulnerabilities in NTLM that allow remote code execution and other NTLM attacks where attackers could exploit vulnerabilities to bypass MIC (Message Integrity Code) protection, session signing and EPA (Enhanced Protection for Authentication).

CrowdStrike believes that continuous testing and evaluation by third-party organizations is critical in helping customers make informed decisions about which security solution best fits their needs. This is why CrowdStrike continues to participate in more third-party testing than any other next-gen endpoint cybersecurity vendor.