Attacks against cloud users surged in 2020

Cloud user accounts were the target of nearly 3.1 million external cyberattacks for the entirety of last year, with the pace of attacks peaking during the second quarter, according to TechRepublic, citing the recently released McAfee Labs Threats Report: April 2021. Based on data from over 30 million McAfee software users from every major industry such as health care, financial services and manufacturing, McAfee named Thailand as the largest target of cloud-based cyberattacks, having been hit with more than 600,000 attacks in the second quarter alone, followed by 500,000 attacks separately in the third and fourth quarters. India came in second place, while the US ranked among the least-targeted countries. The spike in attacks was attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted a migration among companies to remote work and an increased dependency on cloud technology and was capitalized on by threat actors who deployed phishing campaigns and other attacks themed around the coronavirus. These types of threats increased in volume by 605% during the second quarter, 240% in the third and 114% during the fourth, according to McAfee’s report.