Cyber intrusion activity and cloud‑centric attacks surged through 2020–2021, turning the cloud from a quiet utility into a primary battleground for organised cybercrime and nation‑state actors. Remote work, rapid cloud migration, and rushed security changes created exactly the kind of fragmented, lightly monitored environment that intrusion crews, ransomware gangs, and initial access brokers could monetise at scale.
Why 2020–2021 became the tipping point
When organisations shifted en masse to work‑from‑home in early 2020, many extended VPN, RDP and cloud access in weeks rather than months, often without mature Zero Trust controls, hardened configurations, or robust monitoring for remote endpoints. Threat actors quickly pivoted: phishing, credential‑stuffing and RDP/VPN brute‑forcing targeted remote workers and exposed services, while misconfigured cloud assets and hastily created SaaS tenants became low‑hanging fruit.
Several analyses note that ransomware emerged as one of the most destructive security trends of 2020, with remote‑office networks showing substantially higher malware exposure than traditional corporate environments. Insider‑risk and policy bypassing also increased, as staff tried to remain productive from home, sometimes using unsanctioned tools or copying data to personal devices and cloud accounts.
The surge in intrusions and ransomware
By 2021, the data made the trend undeniable: multiple threat‑intelligence reports observed that global cyber intrusion activity more than doubled in the first half of 2021 compared with the same period in 2020, with ransomware and extortion leading the charge. Other analyses highlight that ransomware volumes, demands, and average losses all climbed sharply, with more targeted campaigns replacing noisy, opportunistic scatter‑shot attacks.
Threat actors also professionalised around “ransomware‑as‑a‑service” and multi‑stage extortion, where data theft, leak threats, denial‑of‑service and harassment were layered on top of encryption to increase pressure to pay. This industrialisation of intrusion and extortion hit sectors under pandemic stress—healthcare, manufacturing, public administration and education—particularly hard.
Cloud‑centric attacks and the new attack surface
As organisations moved email, collaboration and core line‑of‑business applications into SaaS and public cloud, attackers followed, focusing on identity, configuration and API weaknesses rather than only traditional on‑premise hosts. Common patterns included abuse of stolen cloud credentials, insecure OAuth app integrations, exposed storage buckets, and exploitation of unpatched internet‑facing services that acted as a bridge into cloud management planes.
Reports emphasise that cloud‑related malware and misuse evolved faster than some traditional malware families, and that cloud environments became attractive targets because they were often monitored less rigorously than legacy on‑prem infrastructure. At the same time, the centralisation of data and workloads in cloud platforms meant that a single compromised account or API token could expose entire datasets, backups, and logging streams in one move.
Remote work and expanded evidence footprints
From a forensic and incident‑response perspective, pandemic‑era intrusions spanned home Wi‑Fi, personal and corporate mobile devices, VPN concentrators, identity providers, and multiple cloud tenants. Evidence that used to sit mainly on servers and office workstations now also lives in:pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
- Endpoint telemetry from laptops and mobiles used at home.
- Cloud audit logs (IAM events, configuration changes, administrative actions).
- Collaboration platforms (Teams, Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace) carrying both user activity and attacker lateral‑movement traces.
Investigators therefore must correlate classic host artefacts with cloud logs, identity events and remote‑access trails to build defensible timelines that explain how the intrusion unfolded and where data moved. This expanded footprint complicates investigations but also offers richer visibility for teams equipped to collect and interpret distributed evidence.
What this means for forensics and courts
For organisations like Quantum Infinite Solutions Ltd., the 2020–2021 surge in intrusions and cloud‑centric attacks is the foundation for explaining to courts why modern cases cannot be reconstructed from server logs alone. Robust timelines now draw on:pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
- Mobile and endpoint artefacts from remote workers (messages, browser history, VPN usage).
- Identity and access logs (SSO events, MFA prompts, conditional‑access decisions).
- Cloud provider audit, storage and API logs that reveal attacker persistence and data exfiltration paths.
In court‑facing reports and PowerPoints, this period can be framed as the moment when “cybercrime industrialised around the cloud,” making cloud‑aware, mobile‑inclusive forensics essential to attributing responsibility, quantifying impact, and assessing whether reasonable security steps were in place.
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9367180/
- https://www.bitsight.com/blog/ransomware-emerges-as-most-destructive-cybersecurity-trend-of-2020
- https://www.enisa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/publications/ENISA%20Threat%20Landscape%202021.pdf
- https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/covid-remote-work-cyber-security
- http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1995670/FULLTEXT01.pdf
- https://www.ucd.ie/research/news/2020/covid-19cybersecurityimpactincreasedriskofinsiderthreats/body543705en.html
- https://www.cfodive.com/news/ransomware-attacks-extortion-doubled-in-2021-accenture/619064/
- https://www.extrahop.com/blog/the-past-year-in-cybersecurity
- https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2021/global-cyber-intrusion-activity-more-than-doubled-in-first-half-of-2021-according-to-accentures-cyber-incident-response-update
- https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/95799-global-cyber-intrusion-activity-more-than-doubled-in-first-half-of-2021
- https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/enisa-threat-landscape-2021
- https://www.enisa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/publications/ENISA%20Threat%20Landscape%20for%20Ransomware%20Attacks.pdf
- https://www.triskelelabs.com/blog/cloud-cyber-attacks-the-latest-cloud-computing-security-issues
- https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/blog/2022/08/25/trends-in-cybersecurity-breaches/
- https://nostra.ie/cyber-security/nostras-2021-cyber-security-predictions-2/
- https://www.checkpoint.com/cyber-hub/cyber-security/what-is-cybersecurity/cyber-security-trends-in-2021/
- https://complexdiscovery.com/the-tip-of-the-iceberg-new-enisa-report-on-threat-landscape-for-ransomware-attacks/
- https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmgsites/ch/pdf/the-changing-shape-of-ransomware.pdf
- https://industrialcyber.co/reports/enisa-threat-landscape-2024-identifies-availability-ransomware-data-attacks-as-key-cybersecurity-threats/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590005625000645
- https://www.enisa.europa.eu/topics/cyber-threats/threat-landscape
- https://www.ifsecglobal.com/cyber-security/4-cyber-security-trends-set-to-influence-remote-work-in-2021/
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09585192.2023.2221385
- https://irishtechnews.ie/covid-19s-impact-on-cybersecurity/