Many organizations around the world migrate from legacy on-premise infrastructure to cloud in order to make their businesses more flexible and more resilient, but many have failed to realize the advantages that modernization offers. Cloud migration can reduce existing on-the-site security risks through integrated encryption, logging, personal connectivity, monitoring, DDoS protection, automated patches, and other aspects.

On the other hand, during cloud migration, there is a range of technological concerns to be taken into account. An integrated cloud cyber strategy can enable businesses to improve security through technology in a way that balances resilience with the risk of achieving more consumer confidence through a more secure experience. But, it also has some risk associated with. There are many cases of cloud misconfigurations that lead to several attacks and of course, losses.

Take the recent Capital One data breach, in which a hacker used a misconfigured cloud firewall to obtain access to the data of about 25 million cardholders and applicants, making it one of the greatest data breaches ever. 

Thousands of potential cloud misconfigurations errors exist, and below we share most of the common ones.

What Does It Mean If Your Cloud Data Is Misconfigured?

When a user sets settings that do not guarantee proper encryption for their cloud data, cloud misconfigurations occur. Attackers can use certain misconfigurations to acquire cloud data if there are no strong security measures in place.

Organizations giving uncontrolled outward access by accident are an example of these types of security misconfigurations. This allows all apps and servers, even those that don’t need it, to interact with one another. As a result, digital attackers can take advantage of that misconfiguration to monitor their target’s network and, once they’ve gained a foothold, move laterally around the network to capture cloud data.

Free access to non-HTTP/HTTPS ports and unsecured Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) access pose similar risks. Malicious actors can employ the former to carry out brute force attacks in an attempt to obtain access to cloud data. They can utilize the ICMP Echo diagnostic tool to find out a target’s network or even execute a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault by overloading a server with pings in the latter case.

5 Common Cloud Misconfigurations That Leads To Attacks

Here are five of the most common cloud misconfigurations that lead to attacks.

Misconfiguration 1: Storage Access

Many cloud users believe that “authenticated users” solely refers to people who are already verified within their business or the applicable application when it comes to storage buckets. However, this is not the case. Anyone with Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials, which is practically any AWS customer, is referred to as “authenticated users.” Storage items may become fully exposed to public access as a consequence of this misunderstanding and the resultant misconfiguration of the control settings. 

When you grant access to your employees or staff, make sure you are granting access to the right and trusted individuals.

Misconfiguration 2: Secret Management 

This misconfiguration can be very costly to a company. Secrets such as passwords, Cryptographic keys, user credentials, and private keys must all be kept secure. They’ve been found in poorly set up cloud buckets, corrupted servers, public GitHub projects, and even HTML code. It’s the same thing as taping the key to your house’s deadbolt to the front door.

The solution is to keep track of all the secrets you use on the cloud and check on them on a regular basis to see how secure they are. Malicious hackers could quickly gain access to all of your data and lead to cloud misconfigurations if you don’t take these precautions. Worse, they have the ability to seize control of your cloud services and cause irreversible damage. The adoption of a secret management solution is also crucial. Some examples of strong and scalable secrets management tools include AWS Parameter Store, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and Hashicorp Vault.

Misconfiguration 3: Disabled Monitoring and Logging

Many firms fail to enable, configure, or even check the logs and analytics data that public clouds provide, which can be rather sophisticated in some circumstances. Someone on your cloud computing team should be in charge of evaluating this data on a regular basis and highlighting security-related occurrences. 

This advice isn’t just for public clouds that provide infrastructure as a service. Similar information is frequently provided by storage-as-a-service companies, which must be checked on a regular basis. An update notice or maintenance alert may have major security benefits for your company, but it will be useless if no one pays attention to cloud misconfigurations.

Misconfiguration 4: Excess Permissive Access to Hosts, Devices, and Virtual Machines.

Would you connect a real or virtual server in your data center to the Internet without first passing it via a filter or firewall? Obviously not. People, on the other hand, do practically exactly the same thing all the time in the cloud. Here are a few examples:

• Legacy ports and protocols such as FTP permitted on cloud hosts.
• Legacy ports and protocols such as rsh, rexec, and telnet in physical servers have been virtualized and relocated to the cloud.
• Etcd (port 2379) for Kubernetes clusters exposed to the public Internet

In the cloud, just as you would in the on-premises data center, make sure to encrypt essential ports and disable — or at the very minimum lock down — obsolete, vulnerable protocols.

Misconfiguration 5: Unprotected automated backups

Insider threats are always an ongoing hazard to safety. According to McAfee, around 92 percent of companies have staff who sell credentials on Dark Net. One area in which an insider threat is particularly destructive is the automated backup of cloud service data.

Master data can be secured, but accidentally, improperly configured backups of data can be accessible to these insider threats.

So, ensure cloud data backups are secured in transit as well as at rest during cloud migration. Also, verify permissions to prevent access to the backups.

Safeguarding Your Data in the Cloud from Misconfigurations

Defend yourself against cloud misconfigurations to improve your cloud security methods. Having the necessary tools to apply security measures to cloud data, in particular, is an important component of this. Consider putting together secure configuration management (SCM) program first. You can use this to generate safe cloud data baselines and check for issues.

Don’t stop there, though. There are various cloud security practices that can help you in safeguarding your cloud data. Also, invest in network monitoring solutions that can check the network for suspicious activities. An unusual occurrence in the cloud environment could be an indication of a malicious operator wanting to take advantage of a misconfiguration.

In the traditional Data Center architecture, you are responsible for the security of your whole business environment, including software, physical servers, user credentials, and even physical building security. Your cloud service provider offers essential support for your teams in a cloud environment by taking on a number of operational changes, including safety. Security ownership must be explicitly specified in this dual responsibility framework, whereby each partner has complete authority over its assets, processes, and functions. By collaborating with your cloud service provider and sharing security duties, you can retain a secure and less operational environment expenses.

In Conclusion

The cloud has the ability to be a secure location for data and operations, but only if cloud clients adhere to the dual responsibility framework. You can ensure that your electronic assets in the cloud are safe by keeping these typical misconfigurations in mind and establishing a mechanism to identify misconfigurations as soon as they happen.