Today we released our global Cloud Report as well as our Europe, Middle East and Africa version highlighting cloud activity from October through December of 2015. Each quarter we report on aggregated, anonymized findings such as top used apps, top activities, top policy violations, and other cloud security findings from across our customers using the Netskope Active Platform, including by industry.
We had many compelling findings from last quarter’s data, but the thing that stood out for us was from our research team. In scanning many hundreds of customer tenants, we found that 4.1 percent of those enterprises’ sanctioned apps are laced with malware such as trojans, viruses, and spyware. The volume of malware in those apps ranged from a handful of files to many dozens in a customer tenant.
In further analyzing the malware infections in these customers’ apps, we found an interesting trend: The spread of the malware (or in some cases, the effect of the malware) follows a “fan-out” pattern, spreading exponentially across users through two of the cloud’s most unique and useful capabilities, sync and share.
Let me give you an example that’s top-of-mind given all of the industry chatter about ransomware. In a handful of the enterprises we studied that were hit with ransomware, the cloud played a critical role in the spread of the encrypted effect. Here’s how it happened:
- The user became infected with ransomware
- Upon detonation, the ransomware encrypted files on the user’s hard drive
- Some of the files on the user’s hard drive were in sync folders of a cloud app
- The encrypted versions of the files s