26 Apr Sophos announces new features for its cloud workload protection

Global leader in cybersecurity, Sophos, has unveiled new advancements to its Sophos Cloud Workload Protection, including new Linux host and container security capabilities.

The added features have been created to accelerate the detection and response of in-progress attacks and security incidents within Linux operating systems, improve security operations and bolster application performance.

The new updates come off the back of the latest SophosLab research which determined that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tools, cryptocurrency miners and various types of backdoors were the top three types of Linux threats detected from January through March 2022. In particular, DDoS tools accounted for nearly half of all Linux malware detections during that period.

SophosLabs has also detected a recent increase in ransomware attackers and their attempts to use tools targeting virtual machine hypervisors, many of which run on Linux environments, to carry out their attacks.

Joe Levy, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Sophos, said: “Linux environments continue to grow in surface area as organisations around the world increasingly migrate workloads to the cloud. Even though Linux is widely considered to be one of the most secure operating systems, it still harbors inherent and application-based risks and it is not immune to cyberattacks.

“Attackers target Linux hosts and containers because they are high value, and often under-protected. Sophos Cloud Workload Protection already automates and simplifies the prevention and detection of these attacks on Windows systems, and now Sophos is providing the same observations and capabilities to Linux operating systems.”