News broke this morning that cyber-attacks against cloud services are accelerating at a rapid speed. Microsoft has revealed that the frequency and sophistication of attacks on it users’ cloud-based accounts are “accelerating.” There has been a 300% increase in user accounts attacked over the past year, according to the tech giant’s Identity Security and Protection team. Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh, EMEA Director at Alert Logic commented below.

“There are a number of sophisticated attacks that rely on new detection capabilities most organisations do not have today and they are increasing as organisations get better at security best practices. A recent alert Logic report into similar issues reached the following conclusions:

Over the nine-month period during which our machine-learning effort came to life, we identified approximately 231 attacks in which malicious SQL injection was deployed with a high degree of complexity and sophistication. While this may seem like a small part of the larger picture, it means that 8-10% of the customers we monitored were targeted by actors with better-than-average levels of skill and determination, which is notable.

The remaining 47% of these incidents were detectable only with the use of machine learning.

While we saw close to 37% more incidents in on-premises data centers, this still leaves each public cloud deployment to withstand just over (on average) around 400 incidents in the 18-month period covered by this report. And even lower incident rates do not necessarily translate to lower risk – especially when, as is increasingly more common, businesses rely on the public cloud to handle their highest-value assets.”