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Why Cloud Cyber Attacks happens and how can one be safe ?

Cloud security

Cloud security is the set of strategies and practices for protecting data and applications that are hosted in the cloud. Like cyber security, cloud security is a very broad area, and it is never possible to prevent every variety of attack. Nevertheless, a well-designed cloud security strategy vastly reduces the risk of cyber attacks.

Even with these risks, cloud computing is often more secure than on-premise computing. Most cloud providers have more resources for keeping data secure than individual businesses do, which lets cloud providers keep infrastructure up to date and patch vulnerabilities as soon as possible. A single business on the other hand, may not have enough resources to perform these tasks consistently. Cloud security isn’t the same thing as Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS or SaaS), which refers to security products hosted in the cloud.

What are the main cloud security risks?

Most cloud security risks fit into one of these general categories:

• Data is exposed and leaked
• An unauthorized user from outside the organization has access to internal data
• An internal, authorized user has too much access to internal data
• A malicious attack, like a DDoS attack and malware infection, cripples or destroys cloud infrastructure

The aims of a cloud security strategy is to reduce the threat posed by these risks as much as possible by protecting data, managing user authentication and access and staying operational in the face of an attack.

The key technologies for cloud security

A cloud security strategy should include all of the following technologies:

Encryption

Encryption is a way of scrambling data so that only authorized parties can more the information. If an attacker hacks into a company's cloud and finds unencrypted data, they are able to do any number of malicious actions with the data: leak it, sell it, use it to carry out further attacks and more. Nevertheless, if the company's data is encrypted, the attacker will only find scrambled data that cannot be used unless they somehow discover the decryption key (which should be almost impossible). In this way, encryption helps prevent data leakage and exposure, even when other security measures fail.

Data can be encrypted both at rest (when it is stored) and in transit (while it is sent from one place to another). Cloud data should be encrypted both at rest and in transit so that attackers can’t intercept and read it. Encrypting data in transit should address both data traveling between a cloud and a user and data traveling from one cloud to another, as in a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment. In additionally, data should be encrypted when it is stored in a database and via a cloud storage service. If, the clouds in a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment are connected at the network layer, a VPN can encrypt traffic between them. If they are connected at the application layer, SSL/TLS encryption should be used. 

Identity and access management (IAM)

Identity and access management (IAM) products track who a user is and what they are allowed to do and they authorize users and deny access to unauthorized users as necessary. Identity and access management is extremely important in cloud computing because a user's identity and access privileges determine whether they can access data, not the user's device and location.

Identity and access management helps reduce the threats of unauthorized users gaining access to internal assets and authorized users exceeding their privileges. The rights Identity and access management solution will help mitigate several kinds of attacks, including account takeover and insider attack (when a user and employee abuse their access in order to expose data).

Main Cloud Security Issues and Threats in 2021

Almost every organization has adopted cloud computing to varying degrees within their business. However, with this adoption of the cloud comes the need to ensure that the organization’s cloud security strategy is capable of protecting against the top threats to cloud security.

Unauthorized Access

Unlike an organization’s on-premises infrastructure, their cloud-based deployments are outside the network perimeter and directly accessible from the public Internet. 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. Improperly-configured security and compromised credentials can enable an attacker to gain direct access, potentially without an organization’s knowledge.

Misconfiguration

Misconfigurations of cloud security settings are a leading cause of cloud data breaches. Some organizations’ cloud security posture management strategies are inadequate for protecting of their cloud-based infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure is designed to be simple usable and to enable easy data sharing, making it difficult for organizations to ensure that data is only accessible to authorized parties. Also, organizations using cloud-based infrastructure also don’t have complete visibility and control over their infrastructure, meaning that they need to rely upon security controls provided by their cloud service provider (CSP) to configure and secure their cloud deployments.

Lack of Visibility

An organization’s cloud-based resources are located outside for the corporate network and run on infrastructure that the company doesn’t own. Many traditional tools for achieving network visibility aren’t effective for cloud environments and some organizations lack cloud-focused security tools. This can limit an organization’s ability to monitor their cloud-based resources and protect them against attack.

Insecure Interfaces/APIs

CSPs often provide a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) and interfaces for their customers. These interfaces are well-documented in an attempt to make them easily-usable for a CSP’s customers. Nevertheless, this creates potential issues if a customer has not properly secured the interfaces for their cloud-based infrastructure. 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.