86% of Nigerian firms fall victim to cybersecurity breaches

More than eight in every 10 organisations from Nigeria are currently experiencing cybersecurity breaches, especially in public cloud.

Besides, the affected firms are also battling ransomware put at 34 per cent; other malware, 43 per cent; exposed data, 57 per cent; compromised accounts, 46 per cent and crytojacking, 26 per cent.

According to The State of Cloud Security 2020, a report of global survey released yesterday by Sophos, a United Kingdom based cybersecurity organisation, organisations running multi-cloud environments are more than 50 per cent likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.

Sophos said Europeans suffered the lowest percentage of security incidents in the cloud, an indication that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines are helping to protect organizations from being compromised.

On the other hand, it said that India fared the worst, with 93 per cent of organizations being hit by an attack in the last year.

Principal Research Scientist, Sophos, Chester Wisniewski, said ransomware, not surprisingly, was one of the most widely reported cybercrimes in the public cloud. He added that one of the most successful ransomware attacks include data in the public cloud.

According to the report, attackers are shifting their methods to target cloud environments that cripple necessary infrastructure and increase the likelihood of payment.

“The recent increase in remote working provides extra motivation to disable cloud infrastructure that is being relied on more than ever. So it is worrisome that many organisations still don’t understand their responsibility in securing cloud data and workloads. Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organizations need to carefully manage and monitor cloud environments to stay one step ahead of determined attackers,” Wisniewski stated.

Sophos noted that accidental exposure has continued to plague organizations, with misconfigurations exploited in 64 per cent of reported attacks in Nigeria.

Stated in the Sophos Labs 2020 Threat Report is the finding that misconfigurations drive the majority of incidents and are all too common given cloud management complexities. Despite this, only around a quarter of organizations (25 per cent) from Nigeria say lack of staff expertise is a top area of concern.

Data from Sophos Cloud Optix, a cloud security posture management tool, further revealed that globally, 91 per cent of accounts have over-privileged identity and access management roles, and 98 per cent have multi-factor authentication disabled on their cloud provider accounts.

According to the report, nearly all respondents (97 per cent) from Nigeria expressed concern about their current level of cloud security, an encouraging sign that it is top of mind and important.

Interestingly, the report noted that only 54 per cent of respondents from Nigeria said they had full awareness of their cloud assets and 22 per cent said they were aware of only a minority.