As your business continues moving critical data and workloads into public, private and hybrid cloud environments, it becomes crucial to understand the key security threats you need to watch out for. With increased reliance on the cloud comes increased risk if the necessary precautions aren’t taken.

While the cloud provides tremendous efficiency, scalability and business continuity benefits, it also introduces new attack surfaces and vulnerabilities that cyber criminals aggressively target. Modern cloud security requires an understanding of these threats and a proactive approach across capabilities like identity and access management, infrastructure entitlements, data protection and security monitoring.

Below, we outline the six most significant cloud security threats facing your organization and tips for reducing your exposure and strengthening defenses.

1. Data Breaches

While the cloud provider handles the security of the cloud itself, you are still responsible for protecting the data you put into it. Data exfiltration—stealing sensitive information like customer records or intellectual property — remains a top attack vector. Remember that misconfigured databases, application vulnerabilities, stolen credentials and malicious insiders can all lead to compromised data.

To make matters worse, breaches often go undetected for months, allowing adversaries to extract data while continually covering their tracks. The lack of logging, monitoring, and visibility into cloud data makes timely response difficult. With more data in more places, the blast radius of impact expands.

Mitigate it: Enforce strict access controls and least privilege access to data stores. Employ data loss prevention tools, encryption, tokenization, and database activity monitoring to detect better/prevent breaches. Conduct regular backups so data can be restored if compromised. Limit data replication across regions and accounts to reduce potential impact.

2. Hijacked Accounts and Insider Threats

The actions taken in cloud accounts depend on the user permissions granted. An attacker gaining access to credentials — or a malicious insider with entitlements — can negatively impact cloud-based assets. Misuse of privileges constitutes a major cloud security risk.

Compromised credentials allow attackers to infiltrate cloud accounts, masquerading as authorized users covertly. Threat actors will methodically escalate privileges and survey the environment for monetization opportunities. Disgruntled employees may also abuse assigned permissions to destroy data, steal or disrupt business operations.

Mitigate it: Have strong identity and access controls and policies. Enforce the principle of least privilege access, frequent re-validation of user permissions, and required two-factor authentication for all cloud accounts, admins and root access. Monitor user activity for anomalies and disable ex-employee’s accounts immediately.

3. Misconfigurations and Vulnerable Services

One of the most common causes of cloud security incidents is simple misconfiguration. From storage, buckets left public exposing data to still running default admin passwords on resources to firewall errors allowing malicious access – minor technical oversights can have enormous consequences.

The complexity and frequent changes inherent to cloud environments make consistent configuration challenging. With infrastructure-as-code and automated deployment, risky settings can quickly scale problems globally. Failure to patch known cloud service vulnerabilities promptly also invites attacks.

Mitigate it: Lockdown resource access and network controls. Routinely audit configuration settings using available cloud tools. Remediate any resources not meeting security standards, using policy-as-code to programmatically enforce those standards. Subscribe to provider security bulletin alerts and prioritize patching activities.

4. Lack of Cloud Visibility

If you can’t see risks, you can’t secure against them. As assets and data rapidly move into the cloud, many organizations lose visibility. This leads to unknown exposures and increases the dwell time of threats that go undetected.

With limited internal visibility, you may not know what data resides where, which users have access and where there are unprotected credentials, misconfigurations or suspicious access patterns across cloud accounts. That expanded blind spot keeps risks hidden.

Mitigate it: Implement purpose-built cloud security tools for visibility across cloud accounts, resources, network traffic, user behavior and data stores. Collect, correlate, and analyze security event data. Identify high-risk users, unsafe configurations and suspicious activity for incident response.

5. Insecure Application Interfaces

Custom-built cloud applications have become primary gateways to data and services – making their security posture critical. Cloud-based apps tend to have more components and frequent changes, introducing instability. Exposed APIs and interfaces allow for possible exploitation.

Common issues include broken authentication/access control, injection attacks, improper encryption and business logic flaws. These application-layer risks threaten data leakage, corruption and unauthorized access to cloud resources. Rapid deployments can bypass security hardening processes.

Mitigate it: Prioritize secure software development practices across application lifecycles. Conduct static and dynamic analysis security testing for deployed apps/APIs. Harden public-facing systems and continuously monitor them for emerging threats. Use WAF/API gateways to help validate requests.

6. Compromised Cloud Supply Chains

Today’s cloud environments involve many third parties that support, manage, or connect to cloud services — from vendors to developers to integrators. Compromise anywhere along that supply chain enables a potential pathway for lateral movement toward your cloud data and resources.

With the breadth of supplier relationships, you may have limited visibility into their security controls and posture. Third-party risks then become your risks. For instance, small developer shops working on your cloud apps may lack formal security procedures. SSO integration with a popular SaaS tool could grant overprivileged access.

Mitigate it: Closely vet suppliers and partners allowed access to cloud accounts. Review their access permissions and activity monitoring. Ensure contracted security meets your standards via audits. Limit integration connectivity and tokens to only what is necessary. Implement robust identity and access governance processes around all external entities.

Final Word

Cloud security risks will continue to rapidly evolve as adoption accelerates and attackers focus on new infrastructure and software vulnerabilities. By keeping these high-severity threats on your radar, making cloud security a coordinated company-wide initiative, and implementing both the technical and process recommendations outlined, you’ll be well-positioned to strengthen your defenses in this new environment.

While risks inherently accompany the cloud transformational benefits, I’m confident that your organization can effectively manage those risks with the proper strategy, oversight and appropriate security investments to protect critical data and power cloud success.