Threat clouds: how can companies protect their public cloud data?

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There is no end to the evidence that as more critical data and business applications are hosted in the public cloud, cybercriminals are doing everything they can to exploit them.

While organizations use an average of six different tools or features to secure their public cloud environments, 96% of decision makers still report that their organization has experienced security incidents in the past 12 months. According to the Thales Cloud Security Study 2022, 45% of organizations experienced a cloud-based data breach or audit failure in the past year. Between 2020 and 2021, ransomware-related data breaches increased by 82% and interactive intrusion campaigns by 45%.

Hackers are increasingly aggressively attacking weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and stealing any credentials and other valuable information they can find.

“Cloud services are an essential part of the digital fabric of modern business,” notes a report from cybersecurity technology firm CrowdStrike.

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However, while cloud adoption brings increased agility, scalability, and cost savings, it has also brought contradictory change. “Just as organizations have realized efficiencies from the cloud, so have attackers,” the report authors write. "Hackers use the same services as their prey, and for the same reason: to improve and optimize their operations."

Public clouds do not inherently impose security threats, said Patrick Hevesi, senior vice president analyst at Gartner. In fact, large-scale cloud providers typically have more layers of security, people, and processes in place than most organizations can afford in their own data centers.

However, the biggest red flag for organizations when selecting a public cloud provider is a lack of visibility into their security measures, he said.

Some of the biggest problems in recent memory: misconfigurations of cloud storage buckets, Hevesi said. This opened files for data exfiltration. Some cloud providers have also experienced outages due to misconfigurations of identity platforms. This prevented their cloud services from starting properly, which in turn affected tenants.

Smaller cloud providers, meanwhile, have been taken offline due to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. It occurs when perpetrators make a machine or network resource unavailable to intended users by disrupting the services - short or long term - of a host connected to a network.

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Andras Cser identified the biggest problem as the software configuration of public cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) that lack a appropriate identity and access management.

“These configuration artifacts are easy to modify and stay under the radar,” Cser said.

Insecure configuration of storage instances: writable, unencrypted, for...