Welcome to the first edition in 2022 of our Cloud Threats Memo! One of the key findings of our Cloud and Threat Report – January 2022 is the leadership of Google Drive as the most exploited cloud app for the distribution of malware (and for the record, guess which service ranks at number two—spoiler alert: it is a cloud storage service from Microsoft). Unsurprisingly, this is not the only way in which threat actors can exploit these and other cloud services.

Companies are increasingly moving their IT operations to IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) solutions. Gartner estimates that by 2022, about 60% of business entities will be leveraging cloud-managed offerings, doubling the recorded use in 2018. Cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are generally secure. But since IaaS uses a shared security model, there's a great chance of data security issues, including cybersecurity and workload concerns.

Security Service Edge (SSE) describes the evolving security stack crucial to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) journey, with core platform requirements that include CASB, SWG, and ZTNA capabilities. SASE is an architecture—really, a long-term journey that will change how we all think about security and networking. But SSE, as part of SASE, is a set of cloud-delivered security services you can acquire and make the most of today.

The unexpected and rapid switch from the global workforce to the WFH setup caused by the coronavirus pandemic has prompted companies around the world to make extensive infrastructure adjustments to support employees working exclusively from home. According to the new IDC forecast, the number of mobile workers in the US will steadily increase from 78.5 million in 2020 to 93.5 million in 2024 over the next four years.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in cybersecurity. This is confirmed by a recent Pulse survey of 191 senior executives from companies on four continents: two out of three organizations (68%) say they are using tools that use AI technologies and among those who are not yet using AI, 67% are considering adopting it.

In the early days of 2022, two extremely popular JavaScript open source packages, colors.js, and faker.js, were modified to the point of being unusable. The reason for this event can be traced to various motivations, but what is worth mentioning is that several applications that employed those dependencies were involved. The two impacted packages can be used for different purposes in JavaScript applications. colors.js enables color and style customization in the node.js console.