Cybercrime Moves to the Cloud to Accelerate Attacks Amid Data Glut

Cybercriminals are embracing cloud-based services and technologies in order to accelerate their attacks on organizations and better monetize their wares, researchers have found. This is largely driven by cybercriminals who sell access to what they call “clouds of logs,” which are caches of stolen credentials and other data hosted in the cloud. The cloud-based approach makes the information more easily available to interested buyers, who then turn around and use the data to conduct secondary attacks, according to Trend Micro. Malicious actors are offering “cloud-based tools [to buyers] for analyzing and extracting the data that they need to conduct [these] further malicious activities,” explained the firm in a Monday posting, which characterized the development as a relatively new approach. The move to the cloud for cybercriminals has the same main benefit as it does for legitimate organizations: Speed. Trend Micro said that the time between an initial data heist to that stolen information being used against an enterprise has decreased from weeks to days or even hours when the cloud approach is taken. “With the introduction of cloud-based services and technologies, criminals are equipped to steal, purchase and use data to conduct their attacks much faster when targeting organizations,” researchers said, using the analogy of the time it takes someone to buy their tools at a garage sale versus buying them from an online shopping site. And with faster transactions in play,…

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