A Look Into Public Clouds From the Ransomware Actor's Perspective
Summary: Unit 42 researchers assessed that no known ransomware actor currently targets public cloud environments, and that existing ransomware will not work there because cloud-native infrastructure differs fundamentally from on-premises IT. The report cites a 2021 average ransom demand of $2.2 million and average payment of $541,010, at least 130 ransomware families detected since 2020, and notes that 24% of exposed VM instances in public clouds have known vulnerabilities.
Why it matters: A single leaked high-privilege cloud credential can reach every resource behind the same API gateway, letting an attacker bypass the containers, VPCs and account boundaries that Unit 42 says make clouds more resilient than on-premises systems.
Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗
- Topics
- Ransomware
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