Don't let your cloud cybersecurity choices leave the door open for hackers

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Cloud applications and services provide access to business tools, information and software from anywhere, allowing employees to be productive whether they are working in the office, remotely or a combination of the two. Location doesn't matter; everything they need is just in 'the cloud'.

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But it isn't only employees and businesses who have benefited from the use of cloud computing and the shift towards remote working – it's proving useful for cyber criminals and malicious hackers too, giving them a new set of opportunities to steal sensitive data such as credit card information, passwords, secret intellectual property and more from unwary cloud users.  

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But they might not even need to trick a middle-party to launch a cyberattack; research suggests that as many as 99% of cloud users, services and resources provide excessive permissions. In the vast majority of cases, these permissions, like admin rights, are never required, especially for standard users.  

But if cloud services are misconfigured and admin rights are available where they shouldn't be, hackers can use a simple password as a stepping stone to modify, create or delete cloud environment resources, as well as using them to move around networks to help expand the scope of attacks. And if they hide any accounts they create, the affected organisation will be none the wiser. 

This isn't some theoretical scenario: cyber criminals are actively abusing cloud services to infect networks with trojan malware, including Nanocore, Netwire, and AsyncRAT.

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One of the key aspects of cloud applications that cyber criminals abuse is weak passwords, so IT departments should do their best to ensure that employees are using strong passwords that can't easily be guessed and that, ideally, aren't used elsewhere. This approach makes it much harder for cyber criminals to breach accounts with brute-force attacks. 

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Yet having a strong password won't stop attacks alone, which is why this strategy should be combined with multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all cloud-associated accounts. MFA provides an additional barrier to attacks that requires app-based, SMS-based or hardware-key verification from the user to ensure the attempted login is valid.  

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