In today’s digital world, cloud computing is essential for many businesses, offering unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. But these benefits come with serious security challenges. As businesses become increasingly reliant on cloud services to store and manage their critical data, securing these environments becomes critically important.
Cloud security threats are constantly evolving, requiring constant vigilance from businesses to protect sensitive information and keep operations running smoothly. In this blog, we’ll discuss the top cloud security threats, their causes, impacts, and the best ways to address them. Understanding and addressing these threats can help businesses protect their data and make the most of the power of the cloud. Cloud Computing.
Today’s top cloud security threats
These security threats have emerged as major threats as organizations move critical operations to the cloud. Often, this is due to the complexity of cloud environments and inadequate security measures, which lead to vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit.
Cloud Misconfiguration
Misconfiguration refers to improperly or incorrectly configuring the cloud, resulting in unexpected vulnerabilities in the cloud environment.
What is a cloud misconfiguration?
Cloud configuration is one of the most important tasks an organization will ever undertake: if not done correctly, errors and failures can occur, posing a great risk to sensitive business information.
It’s not just the initial setup that’s important, it’s what happens afterwards too. Cloud providers keep adding new services and features to the cloud, making it a scalable solution for businesses. Keeping up with advancements requires intensive setup and maintenance.
Furthermore, technical as well as non-technical configurations play a key role in maintaining cloud security.
Types of cloud misconfigurations
1. Sharing access and granting permissions
When setting up a cloud or introducing a new feature, you are initially asked for the necessary permissions. However, people who lack cloud knowledge may grant permissions or access that are not relevant or should not be enabled. When information or permissions are unnecessarily exposed, it increases the chances that unauthorized people can break into the system.
Companies often confuse “authenticated” and “authorized” users, which also hampers privacy in the cloud. An authenticated user may have the access credentials but is not legally authorized to access the information, whereas an authorized user has legal access to the data.
An authorized user is always a real user, but a real user is not necessarily an authorized user.
Excessive access includes the following:
- Allowing older protocols on cloud servers
- Opening ports to the Internet
- Exposing sensitive APIs without proper security
- Allow communication between private and public resources
2. Incorrect open inbound and outbound port settings.
These ports enable data transfer in and out of the cloud environment when connected to the Internet, therefore, when configuring the cloud environment, users must ensure that inbound and outbound ports are closed or restricted to only critical systems.
Open inbound ports can allow unwanted visitors into your system and disrupt its functions and data, while outbound ports can lead to data breaches and put sensitive business information at risk.
3. Disable logging
By default, logging is disabled or turned off to reduce system maintenance, but it can limit the system’s ability to detect and resolve potential threats, creating risks of intrusion, data theft, and damage.
These are some of the main misconfigurations that you need to avoid to limit vulnerabilities in your cloud infrastructure.
The risks of misconfiguring the cloud
Cloud misconfigurations can allow malware, viruses, hackers, and other dangerous vulnerabilities to enter your cloud environment and cause damage. According to SentinelOne, 23% of cloud incidents are due to cloud misconfigurations.
These vulnerabilities can expose or steal all the sensitive data stored in the cloud. According to Expert Insights, 45% of data breaches are mainly caused by cloud misconfigurations. This data breach led to third parties using this data to damage the reputation and financial losses of the organization. According to a Forbes report, nearly 46% of organizations suffered reputational damage due to data leakage. It took them many years to recover from the damage and return to normal operations.
Additionally, misconfiguration can lead to unauthorized access to an organization’s network and potentially compromise its transactions.
Simply put, misconfiguration poses a major threat that can lead to data leakage or theft, identity theft, and unauthorized network access, causing serious damage to an organization’s reputation and finances.
Addressing cloud misconfigurations
- Recheck your configuration: The most important step is to double-check all your configurations – your operations teams and developers may have granted permissions that are not useful, so understand them and restrict access controls, and understand where your cloud services or assets are located and where they are being used.
- Run a security check: Make it mandatory to perform regular security checks on your systems. This will ensure that your systems are protected against the latest threats and remain compliant. Leverage security tools and software to keep your systems protected and up to date, and also to identify potential threats in the cloud.
- Strategy and policy development: Your organization’s IT professionals should develop a strategy to ensure that new instances of cloud infrastructure or applications are secure based on past experience. Consult with an expert. Cloud Consulting Services Providers can also offer specialized insights and solutions to prevent misconfigurations and other security risks.
Also read: What is cloud security? 9 cloud security best practices for 2024
Insider threats: the second biggest threat to cloud security
Understanding insider threats
This is the second ranked threat to cloud security and indicates the potential risk to an organization from anyone associated with it. This can be anyone directly or indirectly associated with it, such as employees, ex-employees, consultants, executives, vendors, etc. A report by Version revealed that 30% of people inside an organization are involved in data breaches.
These insiders may have strong reasons for carrying out their nefarious activities, such as revenge, ideology, political alliances, or economic harm, but they may also do it out of curiosity or boredom.
Why is this threat particularly dangerous?
The reasons are the same in terms of financial damage or reputational loss to the organization, but the additional consequences are:
- Data and Information Theft
- Data leaks
- Data and system damage
- Selling trade secrets
- Forgetting organization tools
- Becoming a victim of a fraud attack
Dealing with insider threats
To ensure protection against insider threats, consider the following:
- Map where your organization’s sensitive data is stored
- Monitor departing employees and block them from accessing your systems.
- Provide employees with security training on encrypting passwords, reporting lost equipment, and identifying fraud.
- Manage permissions and device lockouts
- Set alerts for suspicious activity such as:
- Application access from unknown devices
- Suspicious downloads and uploads
- Unexpected DNS or HTTP queries
- Modification of sensitive file data and other activities
Also read: What are insider threats? Definition, types and prevention
Other notable cloud security threats
Cloud misconfigurations and insider threats are the biggest security vulnerabilities an organization can face, but there are other threats that can have a significant impact. Other threats include:
Denial of Service Attacks
This attack renders a machine or network inaccessible to the targeted user, removing or disrupting access. This is done by flooding the target network with traffic or sending information that causes the system to crash. First, information buffering. This attack primarily targets top-level authorities such as executives and other employees of an organization who have access to critical business information.
Solution:
- Restrict traffic to specific locations
- Implement a load balancer
- Block communication from old or unused ports
- Record patterns and monitor them regularly
- Use a VPN whenever possible to protect your wireless devices and networks
Account takeover
Access to a cloud platform requires the credentials of authorized users. If a hacker or cybercriminal hijacks these credentials, they will gain access to all your sensitive data, services, and tools. Moreover, they can leverage the entire system for malicious activities.
Solution:
- Enabling multi-factor authentication on your system
- Implement a zero trust policy, i.e. consider all users to be untrusted and require users to authenticate themselves to access sensitive files and resources
Zero-day attacks
This refers to a software or hardware vulnerability that the vendor has only recently learned about and has no time left to fix. It exploits an unknown or unaddressed security flaw in a system that is invisible to the vendor or the organization. The vendor has only just discovered the flaw and has been given “zero day” time to resolve it.
Solution:
- Regular system and software updates
- Use of intrusion detection systems
- Enable alerts for unusual activity
Also read: Beyond passwords: exploring advanced authentication methods
Conclusion
These are some of the latest yet critical cloud security threats and their prevention or solutions. However, we recommend following general security protocols such as installing a reliable firewall solution, installing reliable anti-virus and anti-malware software, utilizing intrusion detection systems, and adhering to the latest security compliances.
