Malware in the Cloud: Odds Are You’re Infected

Malware attacks increased by 358% in 2020, while ransomware attacks, in particular, increased by 435%. Additionally, malware is targeting cloud apps more than ever before, and, at any given moment, 44% of organizations have malware in at least one of their cloud apps. These are all numbers that should give everyone pause. What are you doing to protect your SaaS from malware? It’s critically important, because the odds are that you’re already infected. 

SaaS usage has been on the rise for years, but the shift to remote work brought about by the global pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and the rate at which organizations are embracing cloud-based tools. Throughout this evolution, malicious parties have been all too eager to target the expanding attack surface of organizations that are not prioritizing security. 

You wouldn’t go without threat protection on your endpoints, so why would you go without threat protection in the cloud?

Where Do These SaaS Infections Come from? 

In particular, one malware attack vector goes more neglected than any other: the wealth of unmanaged devices used to access SaaS apps. Like cloud adoption, BYOD adoption has been on the rise for years, but has accelerated in light of remote work and the need for employees to do what it takes to get their work done off premises. 

But personal endpoints can easily house malware and spread threats to corporate SaaS app instances. Unfortunately, premises-based solutions and those that require software installations on endpoints are poor fits for personal devices used remotely. Organizations need something that can respond, but typically lack the appropriate tools to enable BYOD securely. Consequently, malware is easily uploaded from personal endpoints into apps that lack native threat protection, where it can easily spread on download to other devices as well as move to other connected apps and services. 

The stakes simply could not be higher. How will your organization respond?

Bitglass to the Rescue

Bitglass is what your organization needs in order to ensure malware resilience across your SaaS applications. In addition to crawling data at rest to identify threats that have already made their way into your SaaS, we are uniquely positioned to address malware proliferation via unmanaged devices. Through our CASB’s agentless reverse proxy deployment mode, Bitglass can identify malware uploads coming from unmanaged devices in real time and block them automatically; this requires no software installations on endpoints and is a perfect fit for BYOD. Downloads are also agentlessly secured. Customers are given a choice between CrowdStrike, Cylance, and Bitdefender engines, all of which are built directly into Bitglass’ proxy. 

So if you want to secure your SaaS against malware and have ATP that can agentlessly secure even unmanaged devices, choose Bitglass. We’re the only ones that can meet the use case.

Did I mention that our ATP is also available with the other components of our secure access service edge (SASE) offering? You can use our SmartEdge Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and our zero trust network access (ZTNA) to stop threats on the web and in on-premises resources, respectively.

Request a free trial today to see what we can do.