Cloud Computing continues to transform how organizations use, store, and share data, applications, and workloads. Unfortunately, cloud Computing has also introduced a variety of security threats and challenges. With so much going into the cloud, public cloud servers, particularly these assets, become the natural targets for violators.
The Vice President and Cloud Security Leader at Gartner Inc, Jay Helser, states that “The volume of public cloud utilization is growing rapidly so that inevitably leads to a greater body of sensitive stuff that is potentially at risk.”
In contrast to what many people might think, the major responsibility for protecting corporate data in the cloud does not lie within the service provider but only with the cloud customer. According to Heiser, “We are in a cloud security transition period in which focus is shifting from the provider to the customer.” He states that “Enterprises are learning that huge amounts of time spent trying to figure out if any particular cloud service provider is ‘secure’ or not has virtually no payback.”
7 Cloud Security Threats
Data Breaches
A breach in data could be the main objective of a targeted attack, or it might just result from human error, application failure, or poor security practices. In addition, it can involve disclosing any information which was not intended for the general public.
This private information includes personal information such as health, financial, personality identifiable information, property information, or trade secrets. In addition, an organization’s cloud-based data might hold value to different parties for various reasons. Therefore, the risk of the data being breached is not unique to that of cloud computing. However, it does consistently rank as number one when it comes to customers.
Insecure interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs)
Cloud providers have exposed various software user interfaces (UIs) or APIs that customers can use to manage and interact with the cloud services. Provisioning, management, and monitoring are all performed using these interfaces. The security and availability of general cloud services are dependent on the security of the APIs. Therefore, they should be designed to defend against accidental and malicious attempts to circumvent the policy.
Insufficient identity, credential, and access management
Violators impersonating legitimate employers, operators, or designers can read, change, and sometimes even delete data. They will also try to issue the control plane and management functions, sneak on data in transition or even release malicious software that appears to initiate from a genuine source. Consequently, inadequate identity, qualification, or key administration can enable illegal access to data and hypothetically catastrophic damage to establishments or end-users.
Account Hacking
Account hijacking or hacking is one of the oldest kinds of cloud corruption. However, cloud services have added a new threat to the landscape. If attackers gain access to a user’s credentials, they can easily eavesdrop on numerous activities and transactions.
They can also manipulate data, return falsified information, and redirect customers to illegitimate websites. The account and service instances may become the new base used by attackers. With these stolen credentials, hackers might also gain access to critical areas of cloud computing services, which allows them to easily compromise these services’ confidentiality, availability, and integrity.
System Vulnerabilities
System vulnerabilities can be defined as exploitable bugs in systems that the attackers can easily use to penetrate a system for data theft, taking entire control of the system and disrupting the service operations.
Susceptibilities within the apparatuses of the operating system might put the security of all of these services, along with the data, at significant risk. Furthermore, with the introduction of multi-tenancy in the cloud, schemes from various establishments have been placed close to each other and given access to the shared memory with resources which creates a new attack surface.
Data Loss
The data stored on the cloud might be lost for numerous reasons other than malicious attacks. For example, data could be lost due to accidental deletion by the cloud service provider or even because of a physical catastrophe such as a fire. This deletion might lead to permanent data loss unless the provider has taken measures to properly back the data.
Denial of Service (DoS)
DoS attacks have been designed to prevent users of this service from accessing the data and the applications. By compelling the targeted cloud service to ingest excessive amounts of the finite system resources such as processor power, network bandwidth, and disk space, the attackers might cause the system to slow down and leave all legitimate users without access to the services.
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