Similarly, by providing a secure cloud-based data analytics services solution, we enabled the leading telecom service provider with a solution that reduced their hardware and maintenance costs by 26%. As time goes on, more and more services will be made available on a cloud environment. Even if the cloud is technically safe and sound, intruders can hijack data by hacking into less-secure APIs.
- Examples include EU data protection, PCI DSS, FISMA, GLBA, HIPAA, and FERPA – to name a few.
- But traditional protective measures like Web application firewalls (WAFs) are ill-suited for this new age.
- You should never keep encryption keys in the same program as your sensitive information.
- The shared link can be forwarded to someone else, stolen as part of a cyberattack, or guessed by a cybercriminal, providing unauthorized access to the shared resource.
Cyber-attacks in cloud computing are a significant concern due to the vulnerabilities and the potential impact on sensitive data and services. Attackers exploit weaknesses in cloud environments to gain unpermitted access, steal data, disrupt services, or launch other malicious activities. These attacks can take various forms, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, data breaches, malware infections, insider threats, man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, SQL injections, and more. Organizations continue to develop new applications in or migrate existing applications to cloud-based services. The federal government recently made cloud-adoption a central tenet of its IT modernization strategy. In this blog post, we outline 12 risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that organizations face when moving application or data to the cloud.
Review Cloud Configurations
You should never keep encryption keys in the same program as your sensitive information. Besides ensuring they possess encryption keys, IT departments should regularly assess the efficacy of existing encryption protocols. On May 2022, Yahoo’s senior research scientist Qian Sang stole confidential information about Yahoo’s AdLearn product.
Diversifying data storage across several sites or vendors can help mitigate this, preventing loss of information or services should one site be attacked. However, misconfigured cloud services can affect data security, so it is essential to monitor these settings regularly. The mistakes in identity and access management underlie cloud misconfiguration.
Contract Breaches with Business Partners
CSPs often provide a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) and interfaces for their customers. In general, these interfaces are well-documented in an attempt to make them easily-usable for a CSP’s customers. Defending against APTs in a cloud environment is especially difficult because it can be nearly impossible to identify an attacker once they’ve gotten a foothold in the system. Once a cybercriminal successfully gains access to one computer on your network, it is likely they will be able to hack other users in the system. Ineffective security resources and protocols could potentially lead to the hijacking of a cloud network.
This violates the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), greatly increases the attack surface, and increases the risk of full account takeover. An IAM role in an AWS account is an identity with specific permissions that dictate what actions the identity can perform and which resources it can access. Unlike IAM users, IAM roles are not bound to a single person and can be assumed by anyone that is authorized to do so. However, for many use cases, you don’t need long-term access without an expiration date. This is why AWS recommends using temporary credentials (generated using the Security Token Service) instead of AWS keys. In addition to the access key ID and secret access key, temporary credentials also have a security token that specifies the expiration date of the credentials.
How to (Securely) Embrace the Cloud’s Future
The regular audits that you should do must include checking the system and its layers of security to ensure it won’t let anyone break into the APIs. Orca discovered that 70% of organizations have at least two Lambda functions that share the same IAM role. The most hybrid cloud security solutions business important key figures provide you with a compact summary of the topic of “Cloud security” and take you straight to the corresponding statistics. Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.
Furthermore, comprehensive employee training programs on cybersecurity best practices can raise awareness and help prevent unintentional insider incidents. Protecting data, applications, and infrastructure in cloud computing environments involves a combination of technologies, policies, and procedures. This industry-leading training course covers essential topics, such as cloud security concepts, vulnerability assessment, incident response, and overall cloud security program management. It provides participants with in-depth insights into the latest security techniques and best practices specific to cloud computing. Malicious insiders in cloud computing refer to individuals who have authorized access to cloud resources but engage in malicious activities to exploit or compromise the system’s security. These insiders may include employees, contractors, or third-party service providers who misuse their privileges to steal data, disrupt services, or engage in other harmful actions.
Reliable cloud services have security protocols that protect the confidential information that clients have entrusted for safekeeping in their servers. But these protocols can be bypassed or may fail to kick in incase of a breach automatically. Of course, if a breach occurs and sensitive data is accessed, the cloud service provider must inform all of the clients using their service.
Securing sensitive data with multiple backups and ensuring the regulatory compliance of cloud service vendors are two essential steps. Maintaining cloud security through penetration testing and employee training can also help to reduce the risk of a data breach. By having complete control over the cloud infrastructure, a company can ensure the protection of their confidential data and reduce the risk of a data breach. The security risks of cloud computing are mitigated as the company manages the security controls.