August 27, 2015 By Shane Schick 2 min read

Despite the benefits, many large enterprises have been extremely worried about the security risk of moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. But researchers say it’s only 1 percent of employees who represent 75 percent of the potential danger.

In its “Q3 2015 Cybersecurity Report,” a study that examined the behavior of some 10 million people, security vendor CloudLock found that the 1 percent — not to be confused with the extremely wealthy portion of the population targeted by the Occupy movement — cause one security risk after another. This includes using cloud-based software that isn’t authorized by an IT department, sharing their passwords and other files and falling victim to phishing schemes that lead to malware infections on corporate machines.

Unfortunately, it may be difficult to pinpoint who the 1 percent are in any given organization. As CSO Online reported, they could be anyone from senior management to support staff, and a security risk could be triggered by different people at different times. The main point, given the fact that many organizations feel they don’t have enough resources to address all threats, is that they can probably minimize them by focusing on a subset of their entire personnel.

The other main takeaway, CloudLock told BetaNews, is that the greatest security risk involves people rather than technology. The better an organization understands how its staff members behave — particularly those with high clearance or other access privileges — the better they’ll be able to contain dangers posed by the 1 percent who lead to most of the problems.

One way to start, CloudTech suggested, is by enlisting those same people as participants in a data protection strategy. This may sound like common sense, but giving a small concentration of individuals access to or control over the majority of corporate files may be a bigger security risk than failing to update IT equipment or patch software programs.

Of course, this doesn’t mean defending against cloud-related breaches is purely an HR issue. ZDNet recently published details from a study by market research firm Forrester that showed spending on products to minimize security risk is expected to reach $2 billion by 2020. This combination of products and people is essential to strong cybersecurity.

More from

FYSA — VMware Critical Vulnerabilities Patched

< 1 min read - SummaryBroadcom has released a security bulletin, VMSA-2025-0004, addressing and remediating three vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could lead to system compromise. Products affected include vCenter Server, vRealize Operations Manager, and vCloud Director.Threat TopographyThreat Type: Critical VulnerabilitiesIndustry: VirtualizationGeolocation: GlobalOverviewX-Force Incident Command is monitoring activity surrounding Broadcom’s Security Bulletin (VMSA-2025-0004) for three potentially critical vulnerabilities in VMware products. These vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, and CVE-2025-22226, have reportedly been exploited in attacks. X-Force has not been able to validate those claims. The vulnerabilities…

SoaPy: Stealthy enumeration of Active Directory environments through ADWS

10 min read - Introduction Over time, both targeted and large-scale enumeration of Active Directory (AD) environments have become increasingly detected due to modern defensive solutions. During our internship at X-Force Red this past summer, we noticed FalconForce’s SOAPHound was becoming popular for enumerating Active Directory environments. This tool brought a new perspective to Active Directory enumeration by performing collection via Active Directory Web Services (ADWS) instead of directly through Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as other AD enumeration tools had in the past.…

Smoltalk: RCE in open source agents

26 min read - Big shoutout to Hugging Face and the smolagents team for their cooperation and quick turnaround for a fix! Introduction Recently, I have been working on a side project to automate some pentest reconnaissance with AI agents. Just after I started this project, Hugging Face announced the release of smolagents, a lightweight framework for building AI agents that implements the methodology described in the ReAct paper, emphasizing reasoning through iterative decision-making. Interestingly, smolagents enables agents to reason and act by generating…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today