Cloud applications play a crucial role in our personal and professional activities. Every day, without even thinking about it, we access dozens of cloud apps, where we store all kinds of data from financial information to family pictures. Netskope has coined the phrase “Cloud Data Sprawl” for this trend, and a few simple numbers summarise its extent.
On August 9, 2022, we released a blog post about a phishing campaign where attackers were abusing Google Sites and Microsoft Azure Web Apps to steal cryptocurrency wallets and accounts from different targets, namely Coinbase, MetaMask, Kraken, and Gemini. The attackers were abusing SEO techniques to spread the pages and using advanced techniques to steal data, such as using live chats to interact with victims.
We’ve seen major shifts in the digital landscape that have far reaching implications on organizations around the world. These include the widespread adoption of hybrid work, the accelerated migration from on-premise to cloud resources, and the exponential increase of data in the cloud.
One of the benefits of a secure access service edge (SASE) framework is that organizations can dramatically simplify the implementation of security services without having to go through constant network redesigns and appliance operating system updates.
Lampion is a banking trojan with a particular predisposition to targeting Portuguese-speaking users (and exploiting cloud services). First documented in December 2019, the malware has gone through multiple releases, characterized by a number of different mechanisms to deliver the initial VBS (Visual Basic Script Loader). All the different variants have an element in common, the malware is distributed abusing legitimate cloud services throughout different stages of the attack chain.
If 2022 is teaching us anything, it’s that no organisation is an island. A better analogy, if I can be a little poetic, is perhaps that we are ships, buffeted by winds, riding rising and receding tides and trying to chart a course to calmer waters. We can build strong ships, but the ocean is out of our control. This lesson has been served to us in the form of global disruption on a scale that is so far out of our control that it can leave us feeling powerless.
As a security analyst in a growing company, it is often easy to get into the “set it and forget it” mentality. You create one alert after another. Then another. And another. With each alert comes a certain amount of work for an analyst. Analyst time costs money, and some alerts consume more time than others. If most of the alerts result in false positives, a large amount of resources are being spent unnecessarily.
As a direct result of COVID-19 burnout, the ongoing Great Resignation trend might be impacting healthcare more than any other industry. Research shows that healthcare has already lost an estimated 20% of its workforce over the past two years. This turnover is happening top-to-bottom throughout organizations. Doctors are switching between hospitals, administrative staff are leaving the industry, and technology teams are being lured away by higher paying jobs in other sectors.
