Cloud security continues to be a major part of IT infrastructure for years and it continues to be an integral part of Information Technology. As a result, targeting cloud infrastructure has become a big part of the cybersecurity landscape. Companies who have had their cloud infrastructure hacked are typically in a very vulnerable position, this environment usually includes web servers, applications, company information, and important company backups. Here we discuss the top 5 cloud security threats for 2022 that companies should be aware of:
Misconfiguration
Misconfigurations are a huge threat to security in the cloud environment. Cloud infrastructure is designed to be easily accessible and enable easy data sharing. While this is great when it comes to availability and convenience, it can cause issues for security by making it difficult to set up the environment so that data is only accessible to authorized parties. Also, many times organizations don’t have complete control over their environment so they must rely on their cloud service provider (CSP) to configure and secure elements of their cloud deployment. Due to inexperience and on either the client or CSP’s side it can be easy for misconfigurations or security oversight to occur and leave gaps that hackers can exploit.
Insecure Interfaces/APIs
Cloud providers provide several application programming interfaces to allow for developers to either host their applications or integrate different applications within their cloud environment. To make them easy to use these interfaces are usually well-documented and this information is made readily available online. However, if a customer has not properly secured interfaces then the documentation that was designed for customers can be used by a cybercriminal to identify and exploit these APIs to access and exfiltrate sensitive data from an organization’s cloud environment.
Lack of Visibility
An organization’s cloud-based resource exists outside of the corporate network and runs on infrastructure that the company doesn’t own. This means that there is a lack of visibility into the cloud environment that makes it more difficult for companies to monitor their resources. This can limit an organization’s ability to monitor its cloud-based resources and detect and respond to attacks that occur against those resources.
Denial of Service Attacks
The cloud typically hosts IT business-critical infrastructure and any DDOS attacks against them can have a big impact on business. Hackers are aware that CSP provides services for several companies and will attack them knowing that they can negatively impact multiple companies at once. Many times the attacks are indiscriminate and simply aim to affect as many of the CSP’s servers as possible so that they will have pressure from their clients to pay the ransom, which makes for a very effective strategy.
External Data Sharing
One of the main benefits of the cloud is how easy it makes data sharing. Cloud providers allow you to invite a collaborator via email or simply by sharing a link to access shared resources. While this makes it very easy and convenient, it also makes it much more difficult to secure these shared resources because access can be forwarded to anyone else or even guessed by a cybercriminal with relative ease. In a traditional setup, access would need to be given to users by an admin but not in the cloud environment. These new ways of sharing data are much harder to control and provide a much greater security risk.
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