The outreach of cloud computing has seen an exponential rise in recent years, thanks to big players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Anything that becomes popular in the digital world will inevitably become a target of hackers and cloud computing are no different and it is accounted for 20 percent of total cyber attacks in the world, making it the third most targeted platform and it is been increasing day by day.
What is a cloud attack?
A cyber-attack that targets service platforms that offer storage, computing, networking or hosting services via their cloud infrastructure can be classified as a cloud cyber attack. This can include attacks on service platforms that utilize service delivery models like Software as a service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and Platform as a service (PaaS).
Here are the top vulnerable areas where cloud attacks take place:
Data Breaches
Breaches can cause great reputational and financial damage. They could potentially result in loss of intellectual property (IP) and significant legal liabilities.
Misconfiguration and Inadequate Change Control
Misconfiguration of cloud resources is a leading cause of data breaches and can result in deleted or modified resources and service interruptions. The dynamic nature of the cloud makes traditional change control approaches for proper configuration extremely difficult.
Lack of Cloud Security Architecture and Strategy
Without proper planning, customers will be vulnerable to cyber-attacks that can result in financial losses, reputational damage, and legal and compliance issues.
Account Hijacking
Cloud account hijacking is a common tactic in identity theft schemes in which the attacker uses the stolen account information to conduct the malicious or unauthorized activity. When cloud account hijacking occurs, an attacker typically uses a compromised email account or other credentials to impersonate the account owner
Insider Threats
An insider threat is a security risk that originates from within the targeted organization. It typically involves a current or former employee or business associate who has access to sensitive information or privileged accounts within the network of an organization, and who misuses this access.
Traditional security measures tend to focus on external threats and are not always capable of identifying an internal threat emanating from inside the organization.
Weak Control Plane
A weak cloud control plane refers to when a cloud service does not provide adequate or sufficient security controls to meet the security requirements of the customer.
Limited cloud Usage Visibility
Limited cloud usage visibility occurs when an organization does not have the ability to visualize and analyze whether cloud service use within the organization is safe or malicious.
Abuse and Nefarious use of Cloud Services
Abuse and nefarious use of cloud services. This threat refers to attackers leveraging the resources of cloud computing to target users, enterprises, and other cloud providers. Examples include launching DDoS attacks, phishing, email spams, get access to credential databases, and more.
And finally, if we look at the threats of cloud computing at an enterprise level and collectively it can be particularly devastating, depending on what the attackers do with the information. Company integrity and reputations can be destroyed, and confidential data can be leaked or falsified causing significant cost to businesses or their customers.
