Organizations today face more complex and sophisticated security attacks than ever before. As technology evolves, cybercriminals’ tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) evolve with it, making it essential for security leaders to continue to innovate to stay ahead of emerging threats.

To mitigate the risk of credential abuse and cloud misconfigurations — two of today’s biggest cloud security threats — organizations must adapt and develop proactive strategies. 

Credential abuse as a persistent threat

Threat actors consistently leverage stolen credentials, such as usernames and passwords, to gain unauthorized access to cloud infrastructure. In addition to leveraging access for nefarious activities such as cryptomining, threat actors are also monetizing access, often for only a couple of dollars per credential pair.

Given the low effort to harvest such credentials, this pattern will persist and significantly impact organizations, especially those that fail to meet basic security standards.

Credential abuse remains a major and persistent security vulnerability that impacts financial stability, data security, and a company’s reputation, making it imperative for organizations to mitigate this threat.

The impact of cloud misconfigurations

Misconfigurations in cloud environments are another critical security concern. These errors often occur when cloud services are improperly set up, leaving security gaps that attackers can exploit. Recent reports found that in the first half of 2024, threat actors gained initial access to cloud environments due to misconfigured or poorly configured cloud environments.

An overly permissive set of access controls exposing unnecessary services to the public internet is a common misconfiguration organizations navigate in cloud environments.

As IT teams build out new services on top of cloud environments, the larger and more complex it becomes, and the easier it is to create a misconfiguration that leads to a security issue. Effective cloud security relies on accurate configuration and persisting monitoring to mitigate such risks.

The solution? Prioritize proactive security measures

To safeguard against cloud security threats, organizations must adopt holistic security measures that enable a strong cyber posture. This includes: 

Having a centralized view of your environment:

IT teams can easily identify weaknesses and efficiently remediate them through a centralized security management solution that offers a unified view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

It’s also important to give administrators the flexibility to secure environments without compromising operational stability. Incorporating a privileged access management strategy enables stricter permission controls with an escalation process for administrators.

This is particularly effective in serverless architectures, as the administrative burden is much lighter and aligns with more restricted permissions that enhance security. 

Implementing organizational policy services and third-party management:

Organizational policy services allow administrators to establish global guardrails, such as restricting the use of public IP addresses. This not only enforces security standards but also reduces unnecessary services that may inflate the enterprise's cloud budget.

To protect against credential abuse, security teams should prioritize:

• Building strong passwords,
• Enabling two-factor authentication across the enterprise,
• Carefully managing third-party application access,
• Monitoring third-party software vulnerabilities,
• And implementing logging and detective controls. 

Embracing AI-powered detection and response:

Integrating large language models and generative AI into security tooling and threat intelligence enables defenders to surface insights faster, while simultaneously reducing toil and scaling their expertise more effectively. Incorporating AI into identity threat detection and response and cloud identity entitlement management can help automate the protection of credentials, privileges and cloud entitlements, increasing efficiencies in detecting and responding to misuse or theft of enterprise identities — improving security posture overall. 

As cloud security threats become more complex, organizations must strengthen their defenses by leveraging advanced technologies and implementing robust strategies. By adopting a proactive approach to security, organizations can better defend against the latest threats and protect their critical assets.