Alert Logic Releases 2017 Cloud Security Report

Houston, Aug. 15, 2017 -- Alert Logic, the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, today announced the availability of its 2017 Cloud Security Report. The report analyzes customer data from more than 3,800 Alert Logic cloud, on-premises and hybrid cloud customers over an 18 month period, from August 1, 2015 to January 31, 2017.  Report findings are based on an analysis of more than 2 million security incidents captured in Alert Logic intrusion detection systems and escalated by Alert Logic Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts to its customers over 555 days, 32.5 million events associated with those incidents and 147 petabytes of security data.

“We focused our analysis on incident types and the workloads and environments most at risk,” said Misha Govshteyn, Senior Vice President of Technical and Product Marketing. “Cyber attackers continue to seek the weakest spots in network defenses and businesses need to understand how they are refocusing to take advantage of the changing attack landscape.”

The Alert Logic customers in the report data set represent a broad range of industries (452 unique SIC codes) and organization sizes, from small-to-medium-sized businesses to large-scale enterprises.  82 percent of customer deployments analyzed hosted workloads in the cloud – either on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform or hosted private cloud – and approximately one-third maintained on-premises or cloud hybrid infrastructure.

While the report focuses predominately on OWASP Top 10 attack methods, three other significant categories of attack methods targeting Alert Logic customers are examined. These include brute-force attacks, server-side ransomware and undesirable outside reconnaissance.

Some of the top findings in the report include the following:

• Web applications are the soft underbelly of organizations. Web application attacks accounted for 73 percent of all the incidents flagged in the 18-month evaluation period. Web application attacks affected 85 percent of all Alert Logic customers, with injection-style attacks such as SQL injection leading the pack. 
• Pure public cloud installations experienced the fewest security incidents. On average, customers running applications on public cloud platforms experienced 405 security incidents over the 18-month period while on-premises customers experienced a 51% higher rate of security incident escalations (612), hosted private cloud 69% higher (684) and hybrid cloud 141% higher (977).
  
  
• Server-side ransomware represented only 2 percent of total incidents. While ransomware gets much mindshare in the cyber security industry and in media headlines, it accounted for only a small number of observed security incidents in the data set.
  
  
• Bad actors like content management systems and e-Commerce platforms.  Vulnerabilities in ubiquitous third-party web application components, insecure coding practices and increases in exploit automation make content management systems and e-Commerce platforms rich hunting grounds for hackers targeting web applications.  Attacks targeting Joomla accounted for 25 percent of total web application attacks observed followed by WordPress with 10 percent and Magento with 7 percent.

The report also examines five industry verticals – Finance Services and Insurance; Health Services; Information Technology and Services; Production, Manufacturing, and Logistics, and Retail and Accommodation – to pinpoint prevalent attack vectors and patterns within those sectors.

To download a full copy of the 2017 Cloud Security Report, visit here.

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About Alert Logic

Alert Logic, the leader in security and compliance solutions for the cloud, provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure resides. Alert Logic partners with the leading cloud platforms and hosting providers to protect over 4,000 organizations worldwide. Built for cloud scale, the Alert Logic patented platform stores petabytes of data, analyses over 400 million events and identifies over 50,000 security incidents each month, which are managed by its 24x7 Security Operations Centers. Alert Logic, founded in 2002, is headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices in Austin, Seattle, Dallas, Cardiff, Belfast and London. For more information, please visit www.alertlogic.com.

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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/fdeb7908-a8c7-4910-96fd-d0aff0067082

Dex Polizzi
W2 Communications
703-877-8106
[email protected]