Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging trusted cloud services to launch their attacks in order to avoid detection.
Just as business users have turned to cloud computing services and online collaboration software to do their jobs, so too have cybercriminals according to new research from Proofpoint. In recent months, the cybersecurity firm has observed a massive uptick in threat actors abusing Microsoft and Google’s infrastructure to host and send threats across Office 365, Azure, OneDrive, SharePoint, G-Suite and Firebase storage. In 2020, over 59m malicious messages were sent from Microsoft Office 365 targeting thousands of Proofpoint’s customers while more than 90m were sent or hosted by Google with 27 percent sent through the world’s most popular email service, Gmail. During the first quarter of this year, the cybersecurity firm observed seven million malicious messages sent through Office 365 and 45m from Google’s infrastructure. To make matters worse, the malicious message volume from these trusted cloud services exceeded that of any botnet last year.
