19 Cloud Security Challenges and How to Mitigate Risk

What Happened

As businesses move their data to the cloud, they face numerous security challenges, with misconfigurations and human error being the most common ways data is exposed. Anyone using cloud platforms like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace is at risk if their settings are not properly managed or if employee accounts are compromised. These vulnerabilities matter because they can lead to severe data breaches, financial loss, and operational downtime. Organizations should implement strong, context-aware multi-factor authentication (MFA), enforce strict access controls, and continuously monitor their cloud configurations to prevent unauthorized access.

Key Takeaways

• Misconfigurations and human error remain the top risks in cloud environments, often leading to unintended public exposure of sensitive data.
• Identity-based attacks, including account hijacking and MFA fatigue, are primary methods for threat actors to compromise cloud infrastructure.
• AI is increasingly being used to automate attacks and create deepfakes for social engineering and trust exploitation.
• Cloud-targeted ransomware is evolving to include extortion without encryption, focusing on data exfiltration and threatening data leaks.
• Visibility gaps across multiple cloud providers create blind spots that hinder effective threat detection for small IT teams.

Affected Systems

• Microsoft 365
• Google Workspace
• Amazon S3
• Cloud APIs
• Cloud Infrastructure

Attack Chain

Threat actors typically gain initial access to cloud environments through phishing, MFA fatigue, or exploiting misconfigured public-facing assets like S3 buckets. Once inside, they leverage compromised valid accounts to move laterally across integrated cloud services and APIs. The attackers then exfiltrate sensitive data for extortion purposes or deploy cloud-targeted ransomware to disrupt business operations.

Detection Availability

• YARA Rules: No
• Sigma Rules: No
• Snort/Suricata Rules: No
• KQL Queries: No
• Splunk SPL Queries: No
• EQL Queries: No
• Other Detection Logic: No

The article provides high-level concepts and behavioral indicators but does not include specific detection rules or queries.

Detection Engineering Assessment

EDR Visibility: Low — EDR primarily focuses on endpoint OS activity, whereas the threats described are cloud-native and identity-based, occurring within SaaS/IaaS control planes. Network Visibility: Low — Cloud provider traffic is encrypted and handled externally; traditional network sensors will not see API-level interactions between cloud services. Detection Difficulty: Moderate — Detecting these threats requires aggregating and correlating logs across multiple disparate cloud platforms and establishing behavioral baselines for identities.

Required Log Sources

• Cloud Audit Logs
• Identity Provider (IdP) Logs
• SaaS Application Logs
• API Gateway Logs

Hunting Hypotheses

Control Gaps

• Unified cross-cloud visibility
• Context-aware MFA enforcement
• Automated configuration drift detection

Key Behavioral Indicators

• Anomalous login locations (impossible travel)
• High volume of denied MFA requests
• Creation of external email forwarding rules
• Mass file downloads at unusual hours
• Changes to public access settings on storage buckets

False Positive Assessment

• Low

Recommendations

Immediate Mitigation

• Verify against your organization's incident response runbook and team escalation paths before acting.
• Consider reviewing and auditing all public-facing cloud storage buckets (e.g., Amazon S3) to ensure they are not unintentionally exposed.
• Evaluate administrative privileges across cloud platforms and consider revoking 'Global Admin' rights from users who do not strictly require them.

Infrastructure Hardening

• If supported by your tooling, implement Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools to continuously monitor and alert on configuration drift.
• Consider enforcing context-aware Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that evaluates login location, device health, and behavior to mitigate MFA fatigue.
• Evaluate whether all sensitive data is encrypted both at rest and in transit using strong, organization-managed keys where possible.

User Protection

• Consider disabling auto-forwarding of emails to external domains to prevent data exfiltration via compromised accounts.
• If applicable, implement identity behavior analytics to detect anomalous activities such as impossible travel or unusual download volumes.

Security Awareness

• Consider training employees on the risks of MFA fatigue and instructing them on how to report suspicious authentication prompts.
• Evaluate educating staff on the emergence of AI-powered deepfakes and establishing out-of-band verification procedures for urgent financial or data requests.
• Consider establishing clear policies regarding Shadow IT and providing secure, approved alternatives for common employee tasks.

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

• T1078 - Valid Accounts
• T1566 - Phishing
• T1621 - Multi-Factor Authentication Request Generation
• T1557 - Adversary-in-the-Middle
• T1498 - Network Denial of Service
• T1486 - Data Encrypted for Impact
• T1567 - Exfiltration Over Web Service