Unveiling the Cybersecurity Maze: Exploring Cloud Environment Vulnerabilities and Targeted Attacks

Technological advancements are a welcome development in any industry. However, with these changes come the challenge of safeguarding your organization’s resources and cloud environment from vulnerabilities and targeted attacks.

Additionally, 83 percent of organizations use over 20 cybersecurity tools to manage security problems. Not only will this require more resources and effort to manage integrations, but it also causes security silos. As a result, the security landscape has evolved, and attackers are relentlessly finding loopholes to breach existing defenses.

So, how can your organization keep up with digital transformation while protecting sensitive data and valuable resources from breaches?

In the following sections, we’ll explore the different types of cyber-attacks, how to identify the tactics attackers use, and solutions to protect your organization.

Types of Cyber Attacks and Their Potential Impact on Your Business

Recognizing cyber-attacks and the common tactics attackers use helps you make proactive and informed decisions on your incident response plans. It also empowers your employees to be more vigilant and report suspicious activities.

Here, we’ll run through some of the most common types of attacks, how they impact your business, and the tactics attackers use.

Social Engineering

Social engineering is a psychological manipulation attack that involves tricking users or unsuspecting employees into revealing sensitive information or making security mistakes.
Attackers often use different social engineering tactics to lure victims.

Some of them are:

• Phishing involves misleading links in your email that redirect you to a suspicious website where attackers can collect sensitive information, such as login credentials.
• Pretexting: Attackers can create a fabricated story or false scenario to manipulate victims into sharing their information.
• Baiting & Quid Pro Quo: Here, the attacker promises a free “upgrade” in return for clicking a link or sharing sensitive information.
• Tailgating happens when an unauthorized person follows an authenticated employee into a restricted area.

How to Prevent Social Engineering Attacks

1. Conduct regular security awareness training to educate employees on social engineering and common tactics.
2. Encourage employees to verify the identity of individuals making urgent or unusual requests before sharing any information.
3. Implement multi-factor authentication, such as two-factor authentication (2FA), for all critical accounts. This adds an extra layer of security against unauthorized access.
4. Install anti-phishing tools to detect and block phishing emails or websites.
5. Implement email authentication protocols like DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to prevent email spoofing.

Malware Infiltration

Malware is an umbrella term for harmful computer programs like viruses, ransomware and trojans. Attackers can infiltrate your resources and cloud environments with infected files and spread the malware to other resources, causing a data breach.
Considering the average data breach cost is 4.45 million, according to IBM, this incident can jeopardize your business continuity and reputation.

Tips to Prevent Malware Infiltration

1. Regularly scan cloud resources for vulnerabilities and ensure they’re promptly patched.
2. Use up-to-date antivirus and anti-malware software to detect and prevent malware infections.
3. Implement application whitelisting to restrict the execution of unauthorized or untrusted applications.
4. Use Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools to monitor and analyze security events across your cloud infrastructure.
5. Encrypt data at rest and in transit so data is unreadable to attackers.

Vulnerability Exploitation

Attackers may exploit vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure or services to gain unauthorized access. This often happens through cloud misconfigurations like unsecured data storage, allowing attackers to access sensitive files.

Prevention Tips

1. Conduct regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessments to identify and mitigate weaknesses.
2. Patch and update all software to address known vulnerabilities.
3. Deploy endpoint security defense tools, such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems (ID/IPS), and anti-malware/antivirus.
4. Implement security monitoring and logging to detect and respond to incidents in real-time.

Insider Threats

Insider threats occur when employees or contractors with privileged access misuse their credentials to steal sensitive information. Former employees with access to certain systems may also misuse their permissions to create backdoors.
They may exfiltrate customer data or leak private communications to competitors, allowing them to release competing products faster.

Prevention Tips

1. Restrict access to critical resources using the principle of least privilege (PoLP) or role-based access controls (RBAC).
2. Monitor and control remote access from every endpoint. Always terminate all access whenever an employee leaves.
3. Strengthen network parameter security.
4. Use log correlation engines to monitor and audit employee action.

DDoS Attack

A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack happens when an attacker floods a server with internet traffic, preventing users from accessing your services.
Attackers often use botnets to overwhelm your server with more connection requests than it can handle.

Prevention Tips

1. Use load balancing and scalable cloud infrastructure to handle traffic spikes.
2. Regularly review traffic patterns to identify and mitigate DDoS attacks quickly.
3. Implement DDoS protection tools and services to identify and stop attacks in real-time.
4. Invest in the network capacity to ensure the infrastructure is horizontally and vertically scalable and can withstand complex attacks.

Password Attacks

Password attacks happen due to weak or stolen passwords, which attackers can exploit. There are many tactics cyber criminals may use here, such as brute-force attacks, password spraying, credential stuffing, and dictionary attacks.

Prevention Tips

1. Enforce strong password policies, like periodic password changes and complex passwords. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommends that organizations use a minimum password length of eight characters and a maximum of 64 characters if protecting particularly sensitive data.
2. Implement cloud access management, single sign-on, and encryption.
3. Monitor login attempts by implementing account lockout policies and rate limiting to prevent brute-force attacks.
4. Implement two-factor authentication (2FA) for an extra layer of security.

Most organizations use specialized tools to protect against each threat they face. However, constant integration with third-party apps can expose your cloud environment to security vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks.

Instead, invest in comprehensive cloud security software that offers robust protection against all cybersecurity threats.

Stay One Step Ahead With Plerion’s Next-Generation Platform for Today’s Threat Landscape

Plerion’s all-in-one Cloud Security Platform is purpose-built to provide holistic protection for your cloud environment. Address cybersecurity threats effectively with context-rich visibility of all your assets across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP workloads.

Leveraging the strength of Plerion, you can precisely detect, prioritize, and remediate cloud risks across every aspect of your infrastructure.

Our proprietary Risk Calculator delivers quantitative scoring for each asset, helping you prioritize your efforts effectively. Stay compliant with industry standards with our Custom Compliance Builder to map your business technology controls for continuous assurance.

With Plerion, a simple connection in minutes means staying secure forever. Want to learn more?

Book a personalized walk-through now.