When it comes to applications and software, the key word is ‘more.’ Driven by the needs of a digital economy, businesses depend more and more on applications for everything from simplifying business operations to creating innovative new revenue opportunities. Cloud-native application development adds even more fuel to the fire. However, that word works both ways: Those applications are often more complex and use open-source code that contains more vulnerabilities than ever before.

Municipalities are no strangers to cyberattacks, but the introduction and ready availability of malware through ransomware-as-a-service providers has led to an increasing number of attacks against cities and counties. One small sample taken from the past six months revealed that Lowell, Mass., Spartanburg County, S.C. and Suffolk Country, N.Y. were victimized, knocking services offline and causing millions of dollars in recovery costs.

The Sysdig Threat Research Team (Sysdig TRT) recently discovered a new Freejacking campaign abusing Google’s Vertex AI platform for cryptomining. Vertex AI is a SaaS, which makes it vulnerable to a number of attacks, such as Freejacking and account takeovers. Freejacking is the act of abusing free services, such as free trials, for financial gain. This freejacking campaign leverages free Coursera courses that provide the attacker with no-cost access to GCP and Vertex AI.

From February to July 2023, Netskope Threat Labs has been tracking a staggering 61-fold increase in traffic to phishing pages hosted in Cloudflare R2. The majority of the phishing campaigns target Microsoft login credentials, although there are some pages targeting Adobe, Dropbox, and other cloud apps. The attacks have been targeting victims mainly in North America and Asia, across different segments, led by the technology, financial services, and banking sectors.