iWorld
Threat actors hone in on cloud apps in the telecoms industry
Mumbai – Netskope Threat Labs has published its latest research report, revealing an increasing trend of attackers abusing popular enterprise apps to deliver malware to victims in the telecoms industry. This rising trend is against a backdrop of continued increase in cloud app adoption in the sector, where users engage strongly with a small selection of popular apps, including Microsoft. Tracking with this increased use of cloud apps, telecoms is the biggest victim of cloud-sourced malware by a considerable 7% margin compared to other industries.
Key findings include:
1. Cloud app adoption:
a. Users in the telecoms industry upload and download files to cloud apps at a similar rate to other industries, but tend to interact with fewer cloud apps on average.
b. The average user in telcos interacts with 24 cloud apps per month, with a strong preference for Microsoft apps. Microsoft OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook are the industry’s top three most popular apps.
c. Microsoft OneDrive is also the most popular app for uploading data, with 30% of telecom industry users uploading data to OneDrive daily, 50% more than the average across all industries. Similarly, Microsoft OneDrive is the most popular app for downloads in the telecoms industry, with 35% of users downloading from it.
2. Cloud app abuse:
a. The percentage of malware downloads from telco industry users fell in line with the global trend, bottoming out in the second half of 2023 and beginning to increase again in early 2024.
b. Organisations in the telecoms industry are the biggest victims of cloud-sourced malware by a considerable 7% margin compared to other industries.
c. Microsoft OneDrive and GitHub had the most malware downloads, followed by Outlook. The other apps in the top 10 are similar to those in other industries with only minor differences, including more malware downloads from SourceForce, the open-source software development website and Google Cloud Storage.
3. Malware and ransomware: Among the most prevalent malware families targeting organisations in the telecoms industry were the remote access Trojan Remcos, the downloader Guloader, and the infostealer AgentTesla.
Speaking on the findings, Netskope cyber intelligence principal Paolo Passeri said;
“Users in the telecoms industry tend to interact with fewer cloud apps in comparison to other verticals, yet the percentage of malware delivered from the cloud is 7 points higher than the other sectors. This indicates that employees within the sector have a more open attitude to cloud services and this inevitably reflects in a wider exposure to threats. They are more familiar with online tools such as cloud apps and this figure shows that threat actors tend to exploit this familiarity.
“This open attitude towards online services is also visible in the malware families that target telecoms users. In comparison to other verticals, there are many more malware families targeting this sector, with a wide range of threats spanning from IoT (the omnipresent Mirai) to downloaders (BanLoad and Guloader), banking trojans (Grandoreiro), infostealers (such as AgentTesla and Redline), and phishing bait PDF documents.
“Interestingly many of these threats are characterised by the exploitation of authentic and well reputed cloud services throughout different stages of the attack chain: Guloader stores the encrypted payload on legitimate cloud services such as Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive, Grandoreiro often abuses Microsoft Azure (but also AWS and Google) to deliver the final payload, and even phishing bait PDF documents are often hosted on legitimate cloud storage service to seem more realistic and legitimate.”
The report is based on anonymised usage data collected about a healthcare sector subset of Netskope’s 2,500+ customers, all of whom give prior authorisation for their data to be analysed in this manner.
iWorld
Meta plans 8,000 layoffs in new AI-led restructuring wave
First phase from May 20 may cut 10 per cent workforce amid AI pivot.
MUMBAI: At Meta, the future may be artificial but the cuts are very real. The social media giant is reportedly preparing a fresh round of layoffs, with an initial wave expected to impact around 8,000 employees as it doubles down on its artificial intelligence ambitions. According to a Reuters report, the first phase of job cuts is slated to begin on May 20, targeting roughly 10 per cent of Meta’s global workforce. With nearly 79,000 employees on its rolls as of December 31, the move marks one of the company’s most significant workforce reductions in recent years.
And this may only be the beginning. Sources indicate that additional layoffs are being planned for the second half of the year, although the scale and timing remain fluid, likely to be shaped by how Meta’s AI capabilities evolve in the coming months. Earlier reports had suggested that total cuts in 2026 could reach 20 per cent or more of its workforce.
The restructuring comes as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg continues to steer the company towards an AI-first operating model, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to the transition. Internally, this shift is already visible: teams within Reality Labs have been reorganised, engineers have been moved into a newly formed Applied AI unit, and a Meta Small Business division has been created to align with broader structural changes.
The trend is hardly isolated. Across the tech sector, companies are trimming headcount while investing aggressively in automation. Amazon, for instance, has reportedly cut around 30,000 corporate roles nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workforce citing efficiency gains driven by AI. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows over 73,000 tech employees have already lost jobs this year, compared with 153,000 in all of 2024.
For Meta, the move echoes its earlier “year of efficiency” in 2022–23, when about 21,000 roles were eliminated amid slowing growth and market pressures. This time, however, the backdrop is different. The company is financially stronger, generating over $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit last year, with shares up 3.68 per cent year-to-date though still below last summer’s peak.
That contrast underlines the shift underway. These layoffs are less about survival and more about reinvention. As Meta restructures itself around AI from autonomous coding agents to advanced machine learning systems, the question is no longer whether the company will change, but how many roles will be left unchanged when it does.
