A new destructive malware called WhisperGate was discovered in mid-January 2022 targeting Ukrainian organizations. This threat emerged during geopolitical conflicts in Ukraine, masquerading as ransomware. However, this malware has a more destructive nature: wiping files and corrupting disks to prevent the OS from loading. Ukraine has suffered other cyberattacks that seem to be connected to WhisperGate, such as the defacement of many websites connected to their governments.
Ever-increasing demands for remote work and the shift to cloud-as-default have propelled many companies to re-energize their data protection and threat neutralization strategies. Successful strategies emphasize robust identity and access management (IAM) and detailed visibility into all traffic and transactions. Okta, one of our strategic partners for IAM, recently published its eighth annual Business at Work report.
In 2021, malicious Office documents accounted for 37% of all malware downloads detected by Netskope, showing favoritism for this infection vector among attackers. This is likely due to the ubiquitous usage of Microsoft Office in enterprises across the globe. Throughout 2021 we have analyzed many techniques used by attackers to deliver payloads through infected documents, which included the return of Emotet, a campaign that primarily uses infected documents to spread malware.
No sooner did word start to spread about Apache Log4j that the usual torrent of blaring headlines, vendor marketing, and tips and tricks-style “information” quickly followed. You can find plenty of solid technical analysis out there about Log4j, and we’ve already posted information about Netskope protections and threat coverage from Netskope Threat Labs. But that’s not this post.
Welcome to the first edition in 2022 of our Cloud Threats Memo! One of the key findings of our Cloud and Threat Report – January 2022 is the leadership of Google Drive as the most exploited cloud app for the distribution of malware (and for the record, guess which service ranks at number two—spoiler alert: it is a cloud storage service from Microsoft). Unsurprisingly, this is not the only way in which threat actors can exploit these and other cloud services.
Security Service Edge (SSE) describes the evolving security stack crucial to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) journey, with core platform requirements that include CASB, SWG, and ZTNA capabilities. SASE is an architecture—really, a long-term journey that will change how we all think about security and networking. But SSE, as part of SASE, is a set of cloud-delivered security services you can acquire and make the most of today.
