Month after month, cyber security tops the headlines with a new malicious hack. Maybe it involves stealing thousands of user credentials or hard-earned profits in Bitcoin or via cash transfers. There’s a never-ending stream of breaches.
Some of the most recent violations include COVID-19 phishing scams and attacks on Twitter. All of these hacks, past, present and future, shake the credibility and trust of the affected organizations.
While we wait for the forensic analysis of the Twitter attack, it's estimated that more than 90% of attacks today start from malicious emails. Most organizations, however, still put the onus on end-users to detect these fraudulent messages.
Phishing is on the Rise in the Collaborative Cloud
In its latest trends report focusing on Q1 2020, the Anti-Phishing Working Group warns the total number of “phishing sites detected in the first quarter of 2020 was 165,772, up from the 162,155 observed in the fourth quarter of 2019.” The biggest category of phishing by far targets workplace cloud collaboration solutions such as the Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) environment.
It’s also important to recognize that cyber criminals are adept at capitalizing on anything trending. In April alone, Google reported a daily tally of more than 18 million Coronavirus-themed malware and phishing emails passing through Gmail.
This figure is on top of 240 million Coronavirus-related spam messages Gmail users were receiving, as noted in a recent Check Point Research article. What’s more, hackers used Google Meet as an impersonation attack vector to execute highly targeted and sophisticated phishing attacks.
In What Way Are Cloud Services like Google Workspace at Risk?
Cloud services are primarily vulnerable in three ways:
- Unauthorized access to an individual or organization’s email or computer account for malicious purposes. In a Check Point survey, account hijacks were the biggest concern among customers and partners.
- Propagation, especially through in-app file sharing services and cloud apps, in order to commit a variety of cybercrimes.
- Data leaks, either intentional or unintentional, in the seamlessness of sharing information in cloud services.
How Can We Bulletproof Our Google Workspace Environment?
Traditional and built-in Cloud security solutions have proven to be insufficient across all the attack vectors coming at them. There’s a better way to secure your end users that provides complete protection against such data breach threats as phishing, business email compromise, impersonation and malware attacks without counting on end users to know wrong from right.
For example, Check Point’s CloudGuard SaaS solution enhances and strengthens Google Cloud’s built-in platform defenses via a single, cost effective solution. CloudGuard SaaS is a prevention-first security solution, designed to deliver superior cyber protection for cloud-based emails and office suite applications, such as Google Workspace. CloudGuard SaaS catches on average 30% more attacks than platform-provided solutions. This catch rate’s success lies mainly in its’ API-based architecture. As an inline, cloud-based security solution, it provides a last line of defense.
As such, it’s trained on identifying what platform-provided solutions miss. It does this using artificial intelligence. This solution is invisible to attackers and doesn’t require any network changes, so it can offer resilient protection against sophisticated and targeted attacks that could cause vital data loss.
Once deployed, CloudGuard SaaS instantly scans cloud mailboxes and applications for already existing threats. When a user receives an email, file or message through a Google Workspace application, it triggers its security engines to examine the shared file for malicious content, and determines if it needs to be quarantined, cleaned, removed, etc.
APIs analyze data in transit and at rest to make sure no malicious content penetrates or propagates within the organization. This all occurs from a single, user-friendly management platform and a single license for email, office and enterprise applications.
