The Cloud Threats Memo is a weekly series from Paolo Passeri, digging into a recent cloud threat and highlighting how Netskope can best help mitigate it.

There’s no doubt that the internet has made almost every element of our lives easier. Virtually everything now has an online presence, from multi-national social media goliaths to your local bakery. Though this has its advantages, it also creates risk. Convenience comes at a cost, and all too often consumers and businesses alike don’t pay enough attention to cyber security until it’s too late.

Is your organization prepared to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against mission-critical cloud-based applications? A DDoS attack is a cyber attack that uses bots to flood the targeted server or application with junk traffic, exhausting its resources and disrupting service for real human users. DDoS attacks are on the rise, with over 4.83 million attacks reported in the first half of 2020 - an increase of more than 250% compared to the same period in 2019.

Cybercriminals have been well ahead of the curve when it comes to cybersecurity in the online retail industry. Specifically, criminals have been exploiting changes in purchasing behavior that favor online transactions and adapting their methods to take advantage of the authentication challenges arising when a card is not present (CNP) at the time of the transaction.

When it comes to cyber security, attackers seem to be classified as terrifying Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) or trivialised as Script Kiddies. However, more often than not, the attackers that are actually faced lie somewhere in the middle; the not-so-advanced yet somewhat-persistent threat. Their attacks are often detected but can be difficult to unravel. Their Tactics, Techniques and Procedures do not include any zero-days, but still they manage to show ingenuity.

Cyber attacks that lead to data breaches are becoming increasingly common in all industries, but there are certain types of businesses that are more vulnerable than others. The hospitality industry in particular is one of the most likely industries to be targeted by cybercriminals in addition to retail and finance.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week we are exploring the concept of supply chain cybersecurity in a time when there is a rising number of third-party cyberattacks.

It’s been more than a month since the SolarWinds breach first started dominating security headlines, and we’re still learning new details about the attacks and the organizations affected. Even as the discussion quiets down, it’s easy to imagine we’ll still be looking back and analyzing the full effects of these incidents in much the same way we talk about other seminal breaches and security events from the past 20 years.

TL;DR: On January 7, the Detectify security research team found that the .cd top-level domain (TLD) was about to be released for anyone to purchase and claimed it to keep it secure before any bad actors snatched it up. A technical report with full details is available on Detectify Labs. This blog post will discuss the basics of domain takeover.