Cloud Security Threats: Top Threats and 3 Mitigation Strategies

What Are Cloud Security Threats?

Cloud security is a top priority for most organizations today. The large volume of information travelling between cloud service providers and organizations creates opportunities for intentional and accidental leaks of sensitive information to malicious third-parties. Insider threats, human error, weak credentials, criminal activity, and malware play a part in many cloud service data breaches. 

Cybercriminals (for example, state-sponsored hacker groups), attempt to use cloud service security vulnerabilities to gain information from the target organization’s network for illicit purposes. Attackers commonly exploit built-in-tools offered by the cloud services to move laterally and exfiltrate sensitive data to systems that they control. 

Cloud services present novel security threats associated with public and authentication APIs. Generally speaking, the characteristics that make cloud services accessible to IT systems and employees also make it hard for organizations to manage and stop unauthorized access.

Why Should You Care About Cloud Security?

The cloud offers the potential to provide greater security than conventional on-site solutions, but this potential does not guarantee security. Security ultimately depends less on the cloud itself and more on how organizations deal with management, oversights and security — what matters is how you use the cloud. Infrastructure alone won’t protect you from cyber threats. 

On average, the cost of a data breach in the world today equals $3.86 million (or $148 per compromised record). This is a global average — the average cost within the U.S. is nearer to $7.9 million. 

However, if an organization manages to address a breach within 30 days, they can save approximately $1 million. If the threat is stopped completely, then an organization can save millions of dollars. 

Cloud security might appear to be expensive and resource-intensive, but not when you consider the above figures. In reality, it is a cost-effective investment with a remarkable ROI. 

Tips from the expert

Steve Moore is Vice President and Chief Security Strategist at Exabeam, helping drive solutions for threat detection and advising customers on security programs and breach response. He is the host of the “The New CISO Podcast,” a Forbes Tech Council member, and Co-founder of TEN18 at Exabeam.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you mitigate cloud security threats more effectively:

Use UEBA to detect abnormal cloud activity
User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) tools can help detect subtle anomalies in user behavior, such as account compromise or unauthorized cloud access, which may be missed by traditional security tools.

Implement least privilege access with automation
Use automated tools to enforce the principle of least privilege across all cloud accounts. This reduces the attack surface by ensuring that users and applications only have the minimum necessary permissions, and automating access revocation when roles change.

Monitor cloud service configurations in real-time
Deploy continuous configuration monitoring to catch misconfigurations before they expose vulnerabilities. Automated tools like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) can detect and remediate these in real time.

Establish a cloud-specific incident response plan
Adapt your incident response plan to address cloud-native risks like metastructure failures and lateral movement between cloud resources. Include automated containment for compromised cloud accounts to minimize damage.

Integrate SIEM with cloud-native tools
Ensure your SIEM integrates directly with cloud-native logging and monitoring services (e.g., AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor). This centralizes event data, making it easier to detect and investigate threats in real-time.

Common Security Threats Facing Cloud Services

Here are some of the most prevalent security threats affecting organizations in the cloud:

Misconfigured Cloud Services

A security misconfiguration is a failure by a cloud user or administrator to correctly apply a security setting. A classic example of cloud misconfiguration is an Amazon S3 storage bucket which is exposed on the public Internet with no authentication. 

Misconfiguration is a leading cost of cloud data breaches, and research shows the number of data records exposed by misconfiguration is rapidly rising. Misconfiguration not only enables data breaches directly, but also opens the door for brute-force access attempts and other exploits.

Data Loss

A major benefit of the cloud is the ease of collaboration, but cloud services often make data, including sensitive data, too easy to share. Many cloud services enable sharing by default, and if permissions are not carefully restricted, users can share data with unauthorized parties, either accidentally or intentionally. 

In recent surveys, a majority of cybersecurity professionals said data leakage was their top cloud security concern. Data breaches generate multiple costs for an organization — financial losses, reputation damage, compliance fines, and also the high cost of recovering or recreating the data.

Insider Threats

Insider threats can take the shape of malicious insiders with ill intent, careless insiders who ignore security policies and allow access to attackers, or attackers who compromise privileged accounts and pose as trusted insiders. Insider threats are difficult to detect and can have disastrous consequences. 

Even in on-premises environments, traditional security tools are often unable to detect insider threats. In a cloud environment, the problem is exacerbated, because of the large number of endpoints and service accounts that could be compromised by an attacker, and the easy connectivity between resources in a cloud network.

Denial-of-Service Attacks

Denial of service (DoS) attacks involve hackers flooding systems with automated empty connections, overwhelming resources and denying service to legitimate users. In the cloud, because systems are often exposed to public networks, there is a much larger threat of DoS. 

Attackers can also leverage the massive scalability of the cloud to drive their attacks. In some cases, attackers compromise cloud accounts and launch cloud instances to perform DoS attacks against others. This can result in high cost to the victim, and legal exposure, because the DoS attack originates from their own cloud environment. 

Metastructure Failures

A metastructure is a set of protocols and mechanisms that allow cloud infrastructure to communicate with other parts of the IT environment. For example, the AWS API and the CloudFormation template engine are critical parts of the metastructure in the Amazon cloud. 

While large cloud providers have formidable development and security resources, they are not perfect. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) discovered several cases in which APIs were poorly implemented by cloud providers, or improperly used by customers, resulting in security risks. Another risk is zero day attacks — hackers discover a vulnerability in a metastructure API, which allows them to attack thousands or even millions of organizations, before the cloud provider discovers the vulnerability and patches it.

Any functional or security failure in the metastructure could lead to large-scale service disruption, financial losses and data loss for a large number of cloud customers.

Addressing Cloud Threats: 4 Mitigation Strategies  

To minimize cloud computing security threats, there are three strategies every organization can use.

Behavioral Profiling

Behavioral profiling, also called User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) is currently a key element of IT security and is a central component of Threat Detection solutions. These solutions may dramatically reduce the time it takes to isolate and react to cyberattacks — identifying threats that conventional products miss by using context and visibility from both on-site and cloud infrastructure.   

The central advantage of UEBA is that it permits you to automatically identify a wide variety of cyberattacks. These include compromised accounts, insider threats, brute-force attacks, data breaches and the creation of new users. 

DevSecOps Processes

DevOps and DevSecOps have been shown time and time again to improve the quality of code and to reduce vulnerabilities and exploits. They can also increase the speed of feature deployment and application development. Integrating development, security processes, and QA within the organization unit or application party — rather than depending on stand-alone security verification teams — is essential to functioning at the pace today’s organizational environment requires. 

Application Deployment and Management Automation Tools

The security skills shortage, together with the growing pace and volume of security threats, indicates that even a highly trained security professional might not keep up. Automation that does away with mundane tasks and supplements human advantages with machine advantages is an essential part of today’s IT operations.

Centralized Management of Services and Providers

No one vendor or product can provide everything, but having several different management tools can make it difficult to unify your security strategy. A unified management system together with an open integration fabric decreases complexity by streamlining workflows and uniting components. Lastly, when trade-off decisions have to be formed, improved visibility should be the top priority, not more control. It is more helpful to be able to view everything in the cloud, rather than having to manage incomplete parts of it. 

Exabeam: Enhancing Threat Detection with Advanced Security Analytics

The Exabeam Security Operations Platform delivers a powerful combination of SIEM, behavioral analytics, automation, and network visibility to transform how organizations detect, investigate, and respond to threats. By correlating firewall logs with data from endpoints, cloud environments, identity systems, and other security sources, Exabeam provides deeper insights into evolving threats that would otherwise go undetected.

Behavior-driven analytics enable Exabeam to go beyond static rules and signatures, identifying anomalous activity that indicates credential misuse, insider threats, or lateral movement across the network. By analyzing normal user and entity behavior over time, Exabeam surfaces high-risk activities that traditional security tools may overlook.

Automated investigations streamline security operations by linking disparate data points into comprehensive threat timelines, reducing the time analysts spend piecing together incidents manually. This allows teams to quickly identify the root cause of an attack and respond with precision.

Learn more about Exabeam SIEM