Cloud Security Threats

Did you know that a recent cloud security report reveals that 68% of the organizations are facing cloud threats just because of the misconfiguration of the cloud platform and 58% because of unauthorized access?

Cloud computing comes with many benefits such as scalability, the flexibility of work practices, business continuity, and reduced IT cost. But there are also some potential threats related to cloud computing. These threats can be data breaches, denial of service, hijacking of the accounts, insecure interfaces, insider threats, etc. In fact, in cloud computing, the likelihood of a data breach is three times higher than the businesses which are not using it.

Now, it has become important to understand the possible cloud threats that may cause harm to your business. In this directory, we will take a look at the seven key cloud security threats that could affect your cloud computing services.

1.Data Breaches

This is the most common threat to cloud computing. It ranks at number one in all the cloud threats. It occurs when any business or organization is attacked by cybercriminals who get unauthorized access to the cloud computing network and be able to view, modify, copy, and transmit the data. Data loss may cause your business to face heavy fines as it violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and aside from the fines, loss of customer’s trust can also cause reputational damage to any business.

2.DDoS

Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks poses significant risks to the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) as well as to the customers. The DDoS attack is an attempt by a cybercriminal to generate so much traffic to a target application that it restricts the traffic flow of the normal visitors. The attacker can flood your system with huge web traffic that your server may not be able to cope up with. This might cause a drastic reduction in speed, a complete outage, or there can be some unexplained consequences in the application’s day to day operations. If your complete business is on the cloud, then this attack makes it impossible to manage your business.

This depicts that a successful DDoS attack on cloud infrastructure can impose a major impact on multiple companies at the same time and as a result, the attacker may demand ransom to stop the attack.

3.Insecure Interfaces/APIs

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) often provide multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) and Interfaces to facilitate their customers. These interfaces are developed in a way to make them easily usable for the CSP’s customers.

This becomes an issue when the customer does not prevent the interfaces for their cloud infrastructure with proper security measures. The vendor document which is designed for the customers can also be used by a cybercriminal in the identification and exploitation of potential methods for accessing sensitive data from the cloud environment of any business.

4.Accounts Hijacking

The challenge of hacked accounts is probably the biggest threat to an organization that uses cloud computing infrastructure. If an attacker gets access to your system with the help of the credentials of any legitimate staff account, he can get access to the vital information of your organization and can cause data theft without you even realizing that your system has been compromised.

The attacker uses tactics such as password cracking, social engineering, and phishing emails in order to gain access to the accounts, and sometimes they can also acquire the accounts be even compromising the cloud service itself.

Many individuals have relatively weak password protection including the use of weak passwords, password length, and reuse. This problem aggravates the impact of phishing attacks and data breaches as it enables several different accounts to use a single stolen password.

One of the ways by which any organization can minimize this kind of risk is to implement proper access management. Every user should have the access to the cloud resources on the need to know basis. By this, you can limit the access of any staff member or user to the services that interest his job requirements only. This way you can limit the impact of a breach of any account that gets compromised.

5.Insider Threat

The employees, it’s contractors, vendors, business partners, etc. without having any malicious intent, can become the biggest security risk due to negligence. If you are moving your business to the cloud, a layer of insider threat from the CSP’s employee is introduced.

Insider threats are a major security concern for any business. An insider with malicious intent may misuse his user access authority on the organization’s network and the sensitive data resources and can impose harm to the organization financially.

As a fact that a cloud-based infrastructure is directly accessible from the public network, it becomes more difficult to identify the malicious insider. Organizations lack control over their underlying infrastructure while deploying the cloud, which makes many traditional security solutions less effective.

6.Visibility Loss

It is possible to use cloud resources through multiple devices, departments, and geographic locations. Such kind of complexity could lead you to lose sight of who is accessing your cloud resources from which part of the globe and what exactly are they accessing, uploading, or downloading.

The cloud-based services of any business are located outside the corporate network and operate on an infrastructure that the organization does not own. As a result, for cloud environments, many traditional tools for achieving network visibility are not efficient, and some organizations lack tools that are focused on cloud security. This can restrict the ability of an organization to track and protect its cloud-based resources.

7.Lack of Training and Awareness

Most of the cybersecurity threats and cloud security threats come in the form of attacks from outsiders, but this issue is triggered by a problem inside the company. And this dilemma lies in failing to take the threat of cybercrime seriously. Awareness among the employees plays a vital role in cybersecurity. It is essential to train all the employees of your organization about the risks of cyberattacks. Your staff is the first line of defence against any kind of cyberattack or breach, so they need to be with the latest details of the threats that are relevant to your business. The management should allocate time and budget for conducting these training and need to make sure that they take place consistently to inform the employees about concerns that genuinely affecting the organization.

Above mentioned threats are some of the cloud security threats that can impose damage to any organization’s finance and reputation. The challenge here is that if you do not put in the resources and defences that are needed, you will eventually be vulnerable to some of these attacks. So, awareness of the relevant threats and development of a good roadmap to protect your cloud environment is essential for every business.

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