Cloud environments under attack by threat actors using new techniques

Enterprises, post-pandemic have slowly started moving from their legacy infrastructure to predominantly cloud platforms. From small to large enterprises the movement towards the cloud has occurred considering various components such as remote and hybrid work structure, efficient and robust security mechanisms, cost-effectiveness, etc. But with digital transformation via cloud adoption comes the risk of an increased number of sophisticated attack techniques by threat actors. According to a prediction by Gartner, more than 95% of workloads will be digital by 2025 and this brings the challenge of facing cyber-attacks against the cloud environment.

"DDoS has been one of the most used cyber-attack tactics against cloud where the number of attacks grew by 27% from2020 to 2021. To mitigate this, Radware's Cloud DDoS Protection Service has been used by enterprises, where on an average 1,591 attacks per day were mitigated. It cannot be denied that, with the transformation being seen in technology, the vulnerability aspects too proportionally increase. Post-pandemic when the digital transformation got fastpaced, the vacuum left during the transition only allowed the cyber-attacks to turn sophisticated. With an increasing number of organizations moving towards a virtual setup, cloud environment has become the new target of the threat actors," said DR Goyal, Vice President at RAH Infotech.

"Ransom DDoS attacks have become a persistent part of the threat landscape. The recent uptick in DDoS activity should be a strong reminder to enterprises, ISPs and CSPs of any size and industry to assess the protection of their essential services and internet connections and plan against globally distributed DDoS attacks aimed at saturating links," said Navneet Daga, Sales Director of Cloud Security Services - APJ, Radware. "With Our leading DDoS mitigation technology & state of the Art scrubbing network we offer customers leading SLA's to have minimum disruption to users & business and mitigate reputational damage to the Brand."

The below aspects have made Radware's cloud DDoS protection service distinctive from other cloud protection products.

Automated, behavioural based, zero-day protection; automatic signature creation; smart SSL attack mitigation and widest coverage with multi-layered protection

The service is backed by 16 globally connected, full mesh mode scrubbing centers, one of them located in India, using analytics-based routing with 10Tbps and growing mitigation capacity

Multiple deployment options, expert emergency response, comprehensive protection and industry-leading SLAs to attract the enterprises

Cloud-only simple deployment makes integration and installation easy One cannot expect to make a tectonic shift in technology and yet be immune to the external influences such as cyber security threats faced. Instead, the focus should be laid more on how to protect itself from threat actors and incur minimum damage as only the right technology would help in continuing to fight the threats successfully.

Question 1

Based on case study. Identify and explain with examples TEN downsides of cloud technology when it involves cyber security threats.

Question 2

Artificial Intelligence can be utilized for all facet of technological development. Discuss SIX positive impact AI can be used for Systems Development Life Cycle.

Question 3

Industry 4.0 originated in 2011. Amongst the benefits from this revolution are increase in productivity, remain competitive, cost effectiveness, increase in knowledge sharing especially for the manufacturing industries. Industry 5.0 has begun and certainly will impact this industry even more. Identify and describe FIVE contributions it will have on the mentioned industry.