Cloud Blind Spots CISOs Need to Be Aware
As enterprises move their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, they need to ensure they have complete visibility into their systems. Otherwise, they risk hidden vulnerabilities, data loss and performance issues.
Many of these blind spots are caused by misconfigurations. To eliminate these blind spots, CISOs should focus on achieving deep observability.
Network Security
The departure from on-prem datacenters to the cloud fundamentally changes your security landscape. While on-prem environments often regarded the network as the security boundary with a hyper-focus on network management and vulnerability patching, cloud is an entirely different environment that’s much more amorphous. This amorphousness has created new security blind spots for CISOs to navigate.
It’s important to understand the most common blind spots on your journey to the cloud and eliminate them. This will help you build a security foundation for your hybrid cloud that’s aligned to your digital transformation ambitions and can future-proof your business.
For example, a common cloud security blind spot is identity and access management (IAM) misconfigurations. This can result in the account being open for connection from anywhere and to anyone, leaving it vulnerable to a dictionary attack. This is a problem that can easily occur as developers spin up instances with default settings for IAM. Another common IAM blind spot is granting too many privileges. This is usually the case when a cloud account has hundreds of roles and thousands of policies, creating a blind spot that attackers can use to hide in your environment.
Default Ports
Default ports are the ones that a service opens by default and aren’t easily changed. As a result, attackers look for these ports to gain access to systems.
This is especially dangerous if the system is vulnerable to attacks such as DDoS and can lead to attackers stealing data or taking full control of the cloud / Server. To overcome this, organisations should have full visibility from user to cloud API to identify any potential threats and take preventive measures to avoid them.
While there are various ways to log activity in the cloud, it can be challenging for security and observability tools to get the visibility they need. For example, it’s common for organizations to not have visibility into encrypted traffic, containers, or even east-to-west traffic. This is because many CSPs only offer limited or no unified logging and monitoring. The solution is to amplify existing tools with actionable network-derived intelligence and provide comprehensive visibility of hybrid cloud infrastructure.
User Access
In a cloud environment, it’s easy for privileged access to fall through the cracks. Attackers often target privileged accounts, such as admin, root and superuser, to gain entry and steal sensitive data or intellectual property.
Security teams need to reassess their deployment processes to prevent human error from causing blind spots. Automated security solutions are also key to addressing this issue and can help to identify vulnerabilities and enforce policies across your entire multi-cloud environment.
The departure from on-prem datacenters to the cloud has fundamentally changed how organisations monitor their environments. Instead of focusing on the network perimeter, they now must consider identity as their security boundary. This means ensuring that identities do not gather enough privilege to access infrastructure or steal data. This requires a complete view of identities and the entities they have access to, with built-in alert scoring for efficient prioritization. This visibility is essential for preventing lateral movement and stopping attackers before they can steal data or disrupt your business operations.
API Access
As the digital transformation revolution dissolves traditional security perimeters, attackers are gaining access to critical systems via APIs. This has led to the creation of blind spots, which have become gateways for threats to enter organizations.
A major problem is that the depth of visibility varies across cloud providers. For instance, while all providers offer some sort of default logging or monitoring, it is rarely enough to get full visibility. In fact, many services don’t log data-level events by default and require additional configuration (and extra cost).
As a result, attacks often go undetected by traditional detection technologies. For example, if an employee accesses sensitive data in a corporate Box account from their personal unmanaged device, you won’t know it unless you have granular visibility that can discern instances and translate encrypted traffic.
