Cloud resources biggest targets for cyberattacks in India, shows study

A study by a multinational firm has identified cloud resources as the "biggest targets" for cyberattacks in India.

Thales has announced the release of the 2024 Thales Cloud Security Study, its annual assessment of the latest cloud security threats, trends and emerging risks based on a survey of nearly 3,000 IT and security professionals across 18 countries in 37 industries, according to a statement.

"The study was based on a global survey of 2,961 respondents, aimed at professionals in security and IT management," it said.

The study "identifies cloud resources as the biggest targets for cyberattacks in India".

Cloud security spending now "tops all other security spending categories", it added.

In India, nearly half (46 per cent) of the respondents reported that all corporate data stored in the cloud is sensitive and 37 per cent of the participating organisations have experienced a cloud data breach in India with 14 per cent having had one in the past year, the statement said.

Also, 35 per cent of the organisations in India recognise the importance of digital sovereignty initiatives as a means of future-proofing their cloud environments, and globally, nearly half of the organisations acknowledge that it is more difficult to manage compliance and privacy in the cloud versus on-premises, it said.

Human error and misconfiguration continue to top the list of root causes of these breaches (34 per cent), followed by exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities (32 per cent), exploiting known vulnerabilities (21 per cent) and failure to use multi-factor authentication (11 per cent), it said.

"As the use of the cloud continues to be strategically vital to many organisations, cloud resources have become the biggest targets for cyber attacks, with cloud storage (30 per cent), SaaS applications (30 per cent) and Cloud Management Infrastructure (28 per cent) cited as the leading categories of attack in India.

"As a result, protecting cloud environments has risen as the top security priority ahead of all other security disciplines," the statement said.