There is mounting evidence that companies may have been naive in accepting Big Tech’s optimistic assurances that sensitive data can be stored more securely in the cloud than on the company’s own servers. In its latest Attack Surface Threat report, Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks reveals that the cloud has now become “the dominant attack surface”, with four out of five security vulnerabilities observed in organizations across all sectors coming from a cloud environment.
The report follows mounting security fears in the IT industry regarding the cloud, such as computing giant IBM tracking 632 new cloud-related vulnerabilities (CVEs) between June 2022 and June 2023, representing a 194 percent increase from the previous year.
According to Palo Alto Networks’ latest report: “Modern organizations are racing to update their enterprise network architectures to take advantage of Zero Trust security designs, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) value delivery, and distributed workforces. This has fueled a dramatic increase of infrastructure, known and unknown, which in turn has greatly increased the complexity of securing their environments.”
Big Tech must bear responsibility
It is of course, inevitable that the huge repositories of highly-saleable data that sit on the cloud would attract the attention of extremely well-organized and resourceful cybercriminal groups as well as hostile nation-states bent on gathering intelligence. But Big Tech must also bear a large part of the responsibility for the cloud’s increasing level of insecurity. By following the long-accepted Silicon Valley stratagem of releasing products and services that require constant upgrades, cloud service providers such as Google and Microsoft may have unwittingly been opening a series of backdoors for cybercriminals.
“Constant change in the cloud creates new risk. Cloud-based IT infrastructure is always in a state of flux. In a given month, an average of 20 percent of an organization’s cloud attack surface will be taken offline and replaced with new or updated services. The deployment of these new services is generally responsible for nearly half of the organizations’ new high or critical cloud exposures every month,” reports Palo Alto Networks.
Organizations in some sectors are currently having to cope with their cloud services being updated even more frequently by their service provider. The insurance and financial sector, always a prime target for cybercriminals, have to cope with an average of 24 percent of its attack surface being replaced with updated services, while transport and logistics are obliged to deal with 27 percent of its attack surface being taken offline every month.
Until Big Tech breaks its long-term habit of expecting customers to assist with ongoing product development, organizations that have sensitive data currently stored on the cloud should attempt to mitigate cybersecurity risks where they can. Palo Alto Networks recommends that companies should start by maintaining a comprehensive, real-time understanding of all internet-accessible assets, including cloud-based systems and services.
