

Alert Logic released their semiannual State of the Cloud Security Report today. Among the most significant outcome of the findings, was the discovery that on-premise IT infrastructure is more likely to be attacked, more often, and through a broader spectrum of attack vectors than cloud-based infrastructures. This finding counters commonly held security concerns about the cloud.
The methodology used in the report included an analysis of operational data from Alert Logic’s business customers in both on-premise and service provider environments. This included comparisons of the occurrence, frequency and diversity of incidents across seven categories of security threats. During the study, 1.5 billion security events were observed, evaluated and correlated and reviewed by Alert Logic’s security analysts. Over 70,000 security incidents were verified and classified into seven incident categories from this pool of events.
Some of the key findings in the report detail:
Interestingly, it appears that industry was not a great predictor of threat levels in the customer base. The likelihood of risk was much more aligned with whether the target was on premises or cloud-based. An additional outstanding point was that about 2/3 of attacks witnessed were based on freely downloadable hacker tools, such that even the most junior of motivated hackers can use them to attack web apps. Close to 44% of the web app attacks witnessed were from the SQL injection attack tool known as Havij, regardless of environments. Most importantly however was that it appears that there is no statistically different security posture in service provider-based environments as opposed to on-premise environments. Most attacks when evaluated across all incidents are poised to exploit misconfiguration events, such as missing patches, unnecessary services, permissions issues and so on. The high percentage of attacks originating in the US are indicative of ubiquitous broadband access and suggests along with other high attack points of origin, that botnets are a phenomenon that persist in the current state of security.
Alert Logic is a SaaS security provider that focuses on delivering security for the cloud environment. With over 1,500 enterprise customers, Alert Logic delivers cloud security and compliance services. Their State of the Cloud security report was launched in February. The report is slated to be launched twice yearly, and intends on expanding the depth of information in the future potentially including analysis of honeypot data and further conceptual topics in future reports. The freely available report can be found at www.alertlogic.com/csr.
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