According to Hornet Security’s recent survey, 93% of European and American businesses adopt a cloud infrastructure within the first five years. They migrate their entire IT system to the cloud or adopt a hybrid infrastructure within the initial five years. This exponential growth of cloud technology has brought new and unique challenges in the cyber security space. While the threat can be of different scale and intensity, the causes making the system vulnerable to these attacks are often common. Here we discuss the top 3 most common causes of cloud security breaches that you should be aware of.
Misconfiguration
Misconfiguration is one of the leading causes of all cloud security incidents. A report published by Check Point Software Technologies says in 2021, the highest number of cloud security breach incidents happened due to misconfiguration.
Companies often struggle with a lack of the required cyber-skill. Besides, while using the public cloud, they do not have total control over the infrastructure and thus have to rely on the security control offered by the cloud service providers. If a company uses multiple cloud infrastructures, they need to configure each of them differently to match the security control provided by the cloud service provider. It further complicates the procedure for the team. Cloud infrastructure is generally designed with ease of access in mind. So, a minor configuration error can lead to a catastrophic breach. Unencrypted and publicly accessible data storage, deactivated security controls, open SSH are some of the most common misconfigurations.
Excessive Permission and Unauthorized Access
Cloud-based resources are directly accessible from the public internet. Cloud deployments with excessive permission can cause data breaches. Through this loophole, the hackers gain access not only to the cloud resources with excessive permission but also to other related resources. Misconfigured security and firewalls are often the root cause of a notorious data breach.
One such example is the infamous Capital One data breach of 2019. The hackers used the web application firewall with excessive permission to lodge a server-side request forgery to steal the security credentials.
Human Error Causing Cloud Security Breaches
About 52% of the data breaches result from some kind of human error. Using weak passwords, incorrectly setting authorization, sending sensitive information to the wrong recipient and placing them in wrong storage, sharing account credentials, and getting tricked by phishing emails are some of the most common forms of human errors.
Companies should invest in employee training to disseminate awareness and knowledge to minimize these errors. The security protocols may seem common knowledge. But in reality, the lack of such knowledge poses the highest security threats for a company.
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