INFOGRAPHIC
McAfee uncovers attacks on
corporate cloud accounts as
companies work remotely
McAfee, a device-to-cloud
cybersecurity company,
has released a new research
study titled Cloud Adoption
and Risk Report – Work from
Home Edition.
McAfee’s new report uncovers a
correlation between the increased
use of cloud services and
collaboration tools, such as Cisco WebEx,
Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack, during the
COVID-19 pandemic, along with an increase
in cyberattacks targeting the cloud. Based on
anonymised and aggregated data from more
than 30 million McAfee MVISION cloud users
worldwide between January and April, the
report reveals significant and potentially long-
lasting trends that include an increase in the
use of cloud services, access from unmanaged
devices and the rise of cloud-native threats.
These trends emphasise the need for new
security delivery models in the distributed
work from home environment of today – and,
likely, the future.
In the time surveyed, overall enterprise
adoption of cloud services spiked by
50%, including industries such as
manufacturing and financial services
that typically rely on legacy on-premises
applications, networking and security more
than others. Use of cloud collaboration
tools increased by up to 600%, with the
education sector seeing the most growth
as more students are required to adopt
distance learning practices.
Threat events from external actors increased
by 630% over the same period. Most of
these external attacks targeted collaboration
services like Microsoft 365 and were largescale
attempts to access cloud accounts
with stolen credentials. Insider threats
remained the same, indicating that working
from home has not negatively influenced
employee loyalty. Access to the cloud by
unmanaged, personal devices doubled,
adding another layer of risk for security
professionals working to keep their data
secure in the cloud.
“While we are seeing a tremendous amount
of courage and global goodwill to overcome
the COVID-19 pandemic, we are also
unfortunately seeing an increase in bad
actors looking to exploit the sudden uptick
30 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com