The documentation designed for the customer can also be used by a cybercriminal to identify and exploit potential methods for accessing and exfiltrating sensitive data from an organization’s cloud environment. Improperly-configured security or compromised credentials can enable an attacker to gain direct access, potentially without an organization’s knowledge. While this is an asset for the accessibility of this infrastructure to employees and customers, it also makes it easier for an attacker to gain unauthorized access to an organization’s cloud-based resources.
“Given the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, it’s difficult for companies to stay ahead of the curve and mitigate their financial and reputational risks. Each analysis describes the threat and its business impacts while offering key takeaways, anecdotes, and real-world examples, in addition to referencing the relevant section of CSA’s Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing v5 domain guides and the relevant mitigating controls in CSA’s Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) and CAIQ v4. Results highlight growing trust in the cloud as traditional cloud security concerns lessen in importance Companies embracing multi-cloud environments should be ready to face a series of unique risks, threats, and challenges that traditional cybersecurity measures fail to mitigate. This incident highlighted the challenges of securing a rapidly growing cloud ecosystem where various services and data stores must be meticulously monitored. In 2020, a misconfigured service in Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage exposed the data of multiple entities, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers.
By using the latest encryption protocols and ensuring proper data management practices are employed, organizations can better protect sensitive information from unauthorized access, even when other security measures fail. This shift enables faster development cycles and more customizable payloads, which are increasingly difficult to detect and block at scale. The number of organizations placing real-time controls on data being sent to personal apps expanded from 70% to 77%, reflecting a growing focus on preventing sensitive data from leaking into unmanaged environments. Organizations must recognize that while these autonomous systems enable new levels of efficiency, they also dramatically expand the attack surface and accelerate the potential for insider-driven data exposure.
- They consist of data breaches, account hijacking, ransomware, and supply chain attacks that occur in cloud environments.
- A failure to secure APIs in cloud environments allows threat actors to bypass access controls and gain direct access to cloud environments.
- In addition, inadequate understanding of a CSP’s storage model may result in data loss.
- By adopting measures such as key rotation, encryption, principle of least privilege, multi-factor authentication, regular monitoring, and security training, organizations can strengthen their cloud security posture and mitigate risks.
- In 2019, the global enterprise software company SAP experienced a data governance failure when a breach exposed the sensitive data of its cloud customers.
- Compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA is critical for organizations that handle sensitive data.
About Cloud Security Alliance
This report explores the key trends in four areas of cybersecurity risk facing organizations worldwide in 2025. Support contacts must provide information reasonably requested by Tenable for the purpose of reproducing any Error or otherwise resolving a support request. Support contacts must be reasonably proficient in the use of information technology, the software they have purchased from Tenable, and familiar with the customer resources that are monitored by means of the software.
Cloud malware injection attacks are a type of cyber attack that involves injecting malicious software, such as viruses or ransomware, into cloud computing resources or infrastructure. This differs from account hijacking, which involves an attacker gaining unauthorized access to an account through means such as password cracking or exploiting vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure. To protect against these vulnerabilities and risks, it is important for organizations to implement appropriate security measures and to regularly monitor https://biolecta.com/articles/constructing-ai-models-exploration/ and review the security of their cloud assets. By adopting the Cymulate real-time cloud exposure validation platform, security teams gain continuous assurance of their posture across the entire cloud stack. Developers and business units can easily spin up cloud resources outside of sanctioned infrastructure.
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- Google Gemini demonstrated strong upward momentum, rising from 46% to 69%, indicating a growing trend of organizations using multiple SaaS genAI services with overlapping functionality.
- Moving to cloud computing increases the attack surface with new vulnerabilities that come attached with added complexity.
- Stay up to date with the most common cloud security frameworks meant to protect your environments and all sensitive data that lives within.
Cloud Security Risks
Many of these vulnerabilities are caused by limited knowledge about security best practices or poor strategic planning. Once they have exploited the vulnerability, attackers might attempt to exfiltrate sensitive data, perform remote code execution, or block legitimate users from accessing their cloud services. Malicious insiders can also access your cloud resources via account hijacking due to a successful phishing attack and/or weak credential security (e.g., if an employee has a password that is too simple or a password is shared between accounts). Malicious insiders, also known as insider threats, are cybersecurity risks that come from within the organization, usually in the form of a disgruntled or negligent employee.
- Suspicious cloud storage object download alerts trigger when a single IAM-based identity downloads a large number of storage objects within a narrow time window.
- Since the cloud is interconnected, this attack quickly spreads out across the entire organization’s cloud infrastructure.
- By focusing on these key best practices, organizations can significantly improve their cloud security posture and better protect their valuable assets and data in the cloud environment.
- The report notes that “45% of intrusions resulted in data theft without immediate extortion attempts at the time of the engagement, and these were often characterized by prolonged dwell times and stealthy persistence.”
- Data breaches in the cloud are typically the result of experienced criminals searching for valuable cloud-based data (medical documents, financial records, PII, etc.).
- Weak credentials, excessive privileges, and compromised accounts can provide attackers with trusted entry points into cloud resources.
However, failure to rotate keys, enforce TLS everywhere or segment encrypted data still leaves many assets exposed. By educating employees on cloud security best practices, http://4dw.net/socal/1939wbfac.php you can help them understand the importance of security and their role in protecting the organization’s data and systems. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a critical and easy-to-implement security control that requires users to provide multiple forms of authentication to access cloud resources. By focusing on these key best practices, organizations can significantly improve their cloud security posture and better protect their valuable assets and data in the cloud environment.
Side-channel attacks can be used to extract sensitive information from a system, such as passwords, encryption keys, or other sensitive data. See why 1,000 CISOs and security teams worldwide say threat exposure validation is key to a strong security posture This shift enabled them to move from reactive alert handling to proactive exposure management, turning cloud security into a strategic advantage.
Insider threats and account hijacking
X-Force anticipates cloud risk in 2026 will continue to be defined by identity exposure, weak administrative practices, insecure integrations, and limited telemetry. Organizations that continue to treat cloud security as an infrastructure problem will remain exposed to ecosystem-level compromise. Looking ahead to 2026, cloud risk will continue to be defined by identity exposure, weak administrative practices, insecure integrations, and limited cross-platform telemetry. Attackers increasingly used exposed credentials, administrative access paths, and trusted service integrations to establish persistence and move laterally across interconnected environments.
The rapid proliferation of agentic AI, alongside its shift toward platform-based, API-driven workflows, sets a challenging security mandate for 2026. Anthropic’s APIs are used by 30% of organizations, a trend fueled by growing developer adoption of Claude models for reasoning-heavy tasks, structured analysis, and application development. The shift toward these enterprise-grade platforms is driven by the expanding availability of secure, cloud-based genAI services that offer stronger privacy controls and deeper integration options. While early adoption favored SaaS applications for their convenience, platform-based solutions now allow companies to host models internally, integrate them with existing infrastructure, and build custom applications or autonomous agents tailored to specific workflows. Although the number of genAI apps Netskope Threat Labs is tracking has increased fivefold, from 317 to more than 1,600 over the past year, the average number of AI apps used in an organization rose just 33% from 6 to 8.
As long as you use the public Internet or cloud, you’re automatically exposing an attack surface to the world. An attack surface is your environment’s total exposure. All companies face security risks, threats, and challenges every day. Learn the key benefits and integration tips for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms. Learn how our fast and scalable platforms provide full visibility, deep insights, and rapid response to help security teams across the World protect, detect, respond, and neutralize advanced cyber adversaries. By strengthening your cloud foundation today, you prepare your organization to withstand the advanced threats of tomorrow — and ensure that the cloud continues to serve as a powerful enabler of innovation, growth, and resilience.