The Cloud and Politics Are Growing Attack Triggers

Dominating the cloud and the world's political discourse apparently comes with a price. As the country that serves as the predominant location of cloud-hosted infrastructure globally, the United States has also become the epicenter of cyber-crime. An analysis of the "2017 Global Threat Intelligence Report" by NTT subsidiary Dimension Data found that the overwhelming majority of cyber-attacks originate from U.S.-based IP addresses, and that many of those attacks rely on public cloud assets as their launching points. And that's not all: The white-hot political climate in the U.S., fueled by last year's bitter election and the initial claims of Russia's meddling in the election results, also helped make the government sector one of the biggest and fastest-growing targets. "Governments all over the world are constantly under the threat of sophisticated attacks launched by rival nation-states, terrorist groups, hacktivists and cyber-criminals," said Matthew Gyde, Dimension Data's group executive of security. "That's because government agencies hold vast amounts of sensitive information—from personnel records, budgetary data and sensitive communications to intelligence findings." The data behind the report was collected from the networks of 10,000 NTT clients across five continents, including 3.5 trillion security logs, 6.2 billion attempted attacks, and global honeypots and sandboxes located in more than 100 countries.