Businesses are no longer sitting on their hands when deciding to move applications and data to the cloud. They are doing it; however, security continues to be a major concern. For us to minimize the risk of security threats, we would first need to identify the top security threats that we are faced with. These can be from a technical perspective or just from simple mistakes.
Data Breaches:
Cloud environments often face many threats that can target the most traditional corporate networks. However due to the array of data being stored within cloud servers, the cloud often becomes an attractive target to breaches. The amount of damage caused can often depend on the sensitivity of the data exposed. The impact of a breach on a company. Companies may obtain fines , face lawsuits or even criminal charges. This can accumulate significant costs to the business and can potentially cause an indirect effect like brand damage and loss of business.
To combat this, cloud providers tend to have security controls to protect the environments of the cloud, but companies do have a responsibility for protecting their own data in the cloud.
Compromised Credentials and broken authentication:
Data breaches and other formats of attack are often a result from a lenient authentication, weak passwords and poor management. Companies of ten struggle with identity management as they try to allocate specific permissions to an appropriate users job role. Another struggle they may have is to remember to remove user access when either a job has changed or when an employee leaves the organisation.
Exploited system vulnerabilities:
System vulnerabilities are not new, however they have become an increasing problem. Organisations tend to share memory, databases and other resources within proximity to one another. This creates a larger area for a bug to attack.
Luckily, attacks on vulnerabilities can be eased with a ‘basic OT process’. These can include a regular scan, prompt patch management and a quick follow up report.
Account Hijacking:
Phishing, fraud and software exploits are successful and cloud services can add another layer to the threat. Attackers can monitor activities, manipulate transactions and modify data. They may also use cloud services to launch other attacks.
Organisations should stop sharing account credentials between users and services. They should also enable a multifactor authentication scheme when available. Accounts and even service accounts should be monitored to ensure that each transaction can be traced to a known owner, so it ensures you that there has be no hijacking to the account.
