On-premises workloads experience 51 percent higher rate of security incidents than applications running on public cloud platforms

Alert Logic,  the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service  solutions for the cloud, announced the availability of its 2017 Cloud Security Report.

The report analyses customer data from more than 3,800 Alert Logic cloud, on-premises and hybrid cloud customers over an 18 month period, from August 1, 2015 to January 31, 2017.  

Report findings are based on an analysis of more than 2 million security incidents captured in Alert Logic intrusion detection systems and escalated by Alert Logic Security Operations Centre (SOC) analysts to its customers over 555 days, 32.5 million events associated with those incidents and 147 petabytes of security data.

“We focused our analysis on incident types and the workloads and environments most at risk,” said Misha Govshteyn, senior VP of Technical and Product Marketing. “Cyber attackers continue to seek the weakest spots in network defences and businesses need to understand how they are refocusing to take advantage of the changing attack landscape."

The Alert Logic customers in the report data set represent a broad range of industries (452 unique SIC codes) and organisation sizes, from small-to-medium-sized businesses to large-scale enterprises. And, 82 percent of customer deployments analysed hosted workloads in the cloud – either on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform or hosted private cloud – and approximately one-third maintained on-premises or cloud hybrid infrastructure.

While the report focuses predominately on OWASP Top 10 attack methods, three other significant categories of attack methods targeting Alert Logic customers are examined. These include brute-force attacks, server-side ransomware and undesirable outside reconnaissance.

Some of the top findings in the report include the following:
* Web applications are the soft underbelly of organizations. Web application attacks accounted for 73 percent of all the incidents flagged in the 18-month evaluation period. Web application attacks affected 85 percent of all Alert Logic customers, with injection-style attacks such as SQL injection leading the pack.

* Pure public cloud installations experienced the fewest security incidents. On average, customers running applications on public cloud platforms experienced 405 security incidents over the 18-month period while on-premises customers experienced a 51 percent higher rate of security incident escalations (612), hosted private cloud 69 percent higher (684) and hybrid cloud 141 percent higher (977).

* Server-side ransomware represented only 2 percent of total incidents. While ransomware gets much mindshare in the cyber security industry and in media headlines, it accounted for only a small number of observed security incidents in the data set.

* Bad actors like content management systems and e-Commerce platforms.  Vulnerabilities in ubiquitous third-party web application components, insecure coding practices and increases in exploit automation make content management systems and e-Commerce platforms rich hunting grounds for hackers targeting web applications.  Attacks targeting Joomla accounted for 25 percent of total web application attacks observed followed by WordPress with 10 percent and Magento with 7 percent.

The report also examines five industry verticals – Finance Services and Insurance; Health Services; Information Technology and Services; Production, Manufacturing, and Logistics, and Retail and Accommodation – to pinpoint prevalent attack vectors and patterns within those sectors.