Dive Brief:

• A new report from Alert Logic found application attacks against clouds jumped 45% in 2014, CSO reported.
• The report was based on an analysis of one billion security events among more than 3,000 enterprise customers.
• The report found 78% of enterprises saw incidents of application attacks last year, up from 48% the year before.

Dive Insight:

Industries where application attacks were the most common included advertising, computer services, manufacturing, real estate, retail and transportation, said Alert Logic.

While attacks against cloud deployments are growing, the study found on-premises infrastructures still see many more attacks. But clouds are a tempting target.

"Customers are moving more and more production workflow to the cloud, including sensitive information, so they're becoming bigger targets," said Rahul Bakshi, Alert Logic's senior director of product management. “There are fantastic applications that are being developed for the cloud that make our lives easier, and have great functionality and user experience. But often, there's not enough security built into these applications."

Different types of companies are attacked in different ways, found the report. For example, Web applications attacks are more common for businesses with large volumes of customer interactions, while attackers targeting companies with limited online customers are more likely seeking intellectual property and prefer to employ tactics such as brute force or phishing attacks.