A Review of Cyberattacks and Their Recent Defense Methods in the Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing has quietly become part and parcel of modern digital infrastructure. It supports a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT), enterprise, and web applications. However, as they become more prevalent, cloud environments are becoming a prime target for advanced cyberattacks such as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), phishing, and privacy-related attacks. This paper presents a structured review of recent advances in cloud cybersecurity, based on peer-reviewed studies published in scientific databases between 2022 and 2025. The review highlights new defense technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning (DL), cloud-edge collaborative security, privacy-preserving methods, blockchain-based trust management, and post-quantum cryptography. The reviewed studies are compared and contrasted to identify trends, strengths, limitations, and gaps in securing cloud computing environments. The results show a clear shift from signature-based security to intelligent, adaptive, and decentralized security architectures that offer better detection precision, faster response, and stronger privacy protection. This review provides an overview of recent advances. It summarizes existing research gaps and directions for future work to achieve secure and resilient cloud services.