The Top Cloud Vulnerabilities & Curative Best Practices
What are the possible Cloud security vulnerabilities? How can you deal with them using best practices?
Organizations of all sizes are now actively adopting cloud computing services. The escalated need for integrating cloud computing indicates that cloud computing services are more useful than the older conventional ways. A piece of concrete evidence at our hands is that cloud computing market growth substantially spiked last year.
But with pros come the cons too – cloud services are faced with the concern regarding data security. A survey stated that ninety-three percent of companies have fears about the risks associated with cloud computing.
What are the top-concerned cloud security vulnerabilities? Let’s find out.
Misconfigured cloud storage
Several data-stealing events happen due to this single problem. Misconfiguration in cloud storage leaves open pathways. The hijackers find these pathways an easy target to accomplish data breaches. If your cloud storage system is harboring misconfigurations, your data is prone to attack from hijackers and cybercriminals.
Misconfigurations usually come into existence when the security framework of an application/website/desktop isn’t properly configured by a developer or system.
The businesses, in pursuit of the competitor businesses, are becoming digital assuming the configuration is the responsibility of service providers. This false assumption that transferring your data to the cloud will make it safe has potential threats to businesses. It is the consumer’s responsibility for fixing these misconfigurations.
To eliminate the security threats linked with Misconfigured cloud storage:
- You must check the cloud security configurations
- Use specialized tools to check the cloud security configurations and identify vulnerabilities
- Take control of who can create and control the cloud services
Insecure APIs
Application user interfaces (APIs) streamline cloud computing efficiently and make the information exchange easier between applications. But if they are left insecure – can become a serious vulnerability.
Cybercriminals usually exploit the insecure APIs to get access to the enterprise data – DDoS attacks are one example of such attack. The attackers use sophisticated methods to execute their tasks while remaining undetected. A careful estimate made by Gartner predicts that APIs shall be the most exploited attack vector by the year 2022.
How to mitigate the attack risks associated with (insecure)APIs?
- Conduct penetration tests simulate API attacks that specifically target your API endpoint
- Use SSL/TLS encryption for data that is being transferred
- To ensure developing the secure APIs, use a secure software development lifecycle (SDLC)
- Implement multifactor authentication
Risk from the employees, partners, and contractors
If companies are not keeping track of who has access to what kind of data and how they’re using it, security problems are likely to arise. When and if the individuals interacting with cloud computing services don’t use the best practices, they put the enterprise data under high-security risks such as phishing and malware.
The company must devise a data security plan to deal with such risk/s. The security plan must entail surveillance, monitoring, escalation, post-incidence analysis, remediation, investigation, and incident response.
Other ways to diminish the risks from malicious insiders are:
- Educate and train the employees to evade phishing and malware
- Conduct regular audits to detect the data security vulnerabilities to fix them
- Allow limited access to the data – only relevant individuals must have access to the data
Loss of Intellectual Property (IP)
Any data stored online is always vulnerable and prone to security threats. Attackers can easily get their hands on intellectual property if they successfully breach the cloud service/s.
The attacker can use the intellectual property for his vicious purposes. If it’s the data alteration or data deletion they seek, you might lose your data for good. But if the attacker goes for ransomware, you might have to pay a large chunk of your business revenue to get hold of your abducted data.
How to prevent the theft of Intellectual Property (IP)?
- Create backups for data, especially offline backups
- Identify which data is not fit for backup and have it saved somewhere else
- Detect any unauthorized activity related to data movement by using data loss prevention (DLP) software
Inefficient Access Management
Access management is the way to assign access to only relevant individuals. The process of allowing individuals access to specific data is known as authorization. Unfortunately, the authorized persons are often not actively taking part in creating a secure regime. Such as some employees do not bother logging out of their account at the end of the day. They do not update their passwords on the regular basis.
Moreover, sometimes the companies also manifest the lethargy towards safe practices. The administrator would not annul the authorization of a former employee. This leaves the crucial data exposed to serious threats of security.
How to combat the potential vulnerabilities linked with Inefficient Access Management?
- A central account should control and monitor all the accounts in a company – it shall be responsible for allowing or disallowing access to individuals
- Integrate third-party tools to regulate the roles and privileges within the company
- Ensure monitoring to identify any unusual activity or unauthorized changes
Conclusion
The data storing practices have evolved at quite a faster pace due to the incessant evolution of technology. And… This is indisputably the era of cloud services.
The companies feel obliged to transfer their data to cloud services for so many right reasons. But companies don’t adopt cloud computing services alone, security problems are tagging along in the background. Unfortunately, the hijackers and cybercriminals also do the best background work. This puts businesses at a huge risk of adopting cloud computing.
Security is a mutual responsibility of both the provider and the company. While some aspects of security are solely the company’s responsibility. It is better for the companies to under all those aspects before bringing on cloud services.
However, cloud security concerns can be dealt with by devising an efficient cybersecurity strategy. The businesses interacting with cloud computing must address the cloud security risks and use the best security tools to eliminate those risks.