Table of Content
- What are Cloud Attacks?
- Common Types of Cloud Attack
- Real-World Examples of Cloud Attacks
- 4 Best Practices to Protect Your Cloud Infrastructure
- Conclusion
As the world evolves digitally, dependency on servers, networks, and other technologies has increased significantly. One such example is the cloud infrastructure, the cloud is a platform that provides various services like software, applications, servers, networks, and many more.
Cloud computing has been increasing rapidly because it allows organizations to process huge volumes of data without having to set up software in their system. This is also cost-effective as organizations don’t have to incur costs on updates as cloud vendors update their software, applications, and other services.
However, with the shift to cloud infrastructure, there has also been an increase in cloud attacks.
What is Cloud Attack?
Cyberattacks that target cloud-based infrastructure are known as cloud attacks. Hackers target cloud services like platforms, applications, software, and servers to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. This has emerged as a serious challenge for organizations to deal with cloud attacks. Cloud attacks lead to data breaches, financial loss, non-compliance with industrial standards, loss of data, and operational disturbance.
This blog emphasizes types of cloud attacks and how an organization can strengthen its cloud security.
Common Types of Cloud Attack
Denial-of-Service (DoS):
Denial-of-service refers to a cloud attack that involves flooding traffic to a cloud application or a server. The aim is to make cloud services unavailable to legitimate users, leading to financial loss. This type of attack may cause a crash in the server or application, making it easier for hackers to gain access to sensitive data,
These types of attacks can also be used as a distraction to carry out other serious attacks like data breaches or malware deployment. However, hackers can also demand some exaction in return to stop the attack.
Malware Attacks:
Malware attacks mean installing or injecting malicious software in cloud environments. These types of attacks are used to gain unauthorized access to user’s information. Ransomware, spyware, and worms are some of the examples of this attack.
This causes data breaches leading to reputational loss of the organization. Moreover, the cost incurred in recovering from malware attacks causes financial loss to organizations.
Insider Threats:
Attacks on the cloud environment can be posed by insiders of the organizations like employees or partners. Identifying insider threats can be difficult as they the legitimate access to data or information of the organization. They can misuse the data either unintentionally due to a lack of security knowledge or intentionally for means of financial gain.
External attackers can hack an insider’s account to gain access, leading to data breaches. Accidents like this happen when employees or partners fall for phishing scams or use weak passwords.
Insecure APIs:
APIs enable applications to communicate with each other, share data, and interact with cloud services. A poorly secured API results in leads to data breaches and resource hijacking. Hackers target such vulnerabilities in cloud-based APIs to gain unauthorized access to personal information.
Along with this hackers can also inject a malicious command into APIs without strong authentication and cannot validate the inputs leading to issues like SQL injection.
Account Hijacking:
Account hijacking refers to hackers getting unauthorized access to the account of the user. The motive behind this is to steal sensitive data, manipulate cloud resources, or exploit the account for malicious activity.
Mostly attackers use phishing methods to trick users into revealing their login credentials or guess their password using different combinations in case they have a weak password or they can use credentials from previous data breaches if the users have reused the password.
Misconfiguration:
Misconfiguration is the most common type of cloud attack. This is because it allows hackers to view sensitive data of the users as the storage of cloud-based services is left open for public view. This empowers hackers to see, modify, and delete data, common examples of this are Google cloud services and Amazon S3.
This can lead to data breaches, resource hijacking, compliance violations, and service disruption as hackers may delete or alter the data leading to downtime. Misconfiguration can also take place due to unrestricted network ports, and weak Identity and access management (IAM) permissions.
Real-World Examples of Cloud Attacks
1. Github (2018)
In 2018 GitHub was targeted by Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). This attack utilized Memcached which is an in-memory storage system used to speed up web applications. Hackers overwhelmed GitHub’s servers by sending a small spoofed request to vulnerable memcached. This allowed them to multiply their attack by 50,000 times.
The attack peaked at 1.3 terabits per second, making it one of the largest DDoS attacks. However, GitHub had DDOS mitigation strategies that were able to detect this attack in 10 minutes and mitigate the attack in approximately 20 minutes.
2. Facebook (2019)
In 2019 Facebook faced a data breach due to misconfiguration. It used to store its cloud-based data in Amazon Web Services S3 and it was mistakenly configured to public access which resulted in anyone downloading or viewing the data on the internet. This exposed the data of approximately 540 million people.
It was discovered by security professionals and Facebook then took immediate action to secure the exposed data and collaborate with security professionals to correct this misconfiguration.
3. Raychat (2021)
In February 2019 Raychat an online chat application faced data beaches. The primary reason for this was a misconfiguration in the MongoDB database a NoSQL database used by Raychat. This attack led to the exposure of 264 million user account data including passwords, user activity, and time however, chats of users were encrypted.
Shortly after this, Raychat also faced an attack on its servers which resulted in a complete wipe of the company’s data. Immediate actions were taken by Raychat to secure the MongoDB database and prevent further unauthorized access to the data.
4 Best Practices to Protect Your Cloud Infrastructure
Secure APIs
Application programming interfaces (API) are like the backbone of cloud environments as they enable users and applications to communicate with cloud services. Securing APIs with authentic mechanisms ensures that there are no data breaches. Furthermore implementing rate limits and throttling will guard against brute-force attacks and avoid overwhelming API services, preventing denial of service attacks.
Encryption
Encryption of data ensures data confidentiality and integrity. This is because it makes data unreadable without a proper description key, meaning a hacker won’t be able to read the data even if gain access to it. Data should be encrypted in three stages:
Data at Rest: It means encrypting stored data even when it’s not used or not actively moving such as data in a hard drive and dataset. Many cloud service providers offer built-in encryption to encrypt data at the storage level.
Data in Transit: Data in transit refers to when data is transferred between two cloud services or between two cloud services such as sending emails, messages, and transferring files.
In-use Data: Data in use means encrypting data that is actively moving, this type of data can be difficult to secure. Technologies like confidential computing use hardware services that help to encrypt data in use.
Implement Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Implementing identity and access management in a cloud environment is crucial as it safeguards user’s data and prevents unauthorized access. This is done by authenticating that is by verifying the user identity who is trying to access cloud resources and authorization that helps in determining what resources a user can access and what activities they can perform.
Moreover, it practices identity federation which allows users to access cloud services with a single identity across different platforms. This reduces the risk of data breaches, resource hijacking, and unauthorized access to user’s account.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools help organizations to manage and secure their sensitive data. This also helps in mitigating the risk of misconfiguration and compliance violation as it continuously monitors the cloud environment for any vulnerabilities.
Moreover, CSPM tools also offer quick remediations to address misconfigurations as they can alert the administration or correct the settings on their own. It helps organizations to effectively manage their cloud asset by identifying potential threats.
Conclusion
As organizations shift to cloud-based services, cloud attacks have been significantly rising. Attacks like data breaches, denial of services, and misconfiguration have disrupted business operations and led to an increase in authorized access to the data. However, staying informed about potential cloud attacks and implementing effective security measures can help organizations stay ahead against attackers. This not only protects the sensitive data of the organization but also maintains trust between the organization and its customers.