When organizations shift their operations wholly or partly to the cloud, they receive out-of-the-box configurations to various systems that cloud service providers give their clients. However, businesses have responsibility to review these out-of-the-box configurations, and make proper adjustments, not the cloud service provider, and once in the cloud, they have to complete all necessary configurations to adequately safeguard their data.
If there is a misconfiguration, a malicious attacker can exploit it to access valuable customer data. Common cloud misconfigurations include unrestricted inbound and outbound access, unrestricted metadata service requests, and passive monitoring of keys and tokens.
Recently, for example, an organization reported the theft of data belonging to over 100 million customers. A past employee of the cloud service provider that the company used identified a misconfiguration in the client company’s web application firewall and used it to break into its cloud system. Once inside, the attacker queried a metadata system to obtain access keys and tokens and used these to collect the data of millions of customers.
Businesses operating through the cloud should make cloud configurations and regular testing of configurations a top priority to avoid creating a back door for cyber attackers to exploit.
