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Moving to cloud computing is quite lucrative for organizations as it offers a wide bundle of benefits such as agility, flexibility, scalability, low cost of hardware assets ownership and so on. But it comes with its own bundle of worries about how secure our data is over the cloud. The cloud related threats are on rise post covid19 era as more and more organizations are moving onto digitalization and primary focus is to move from on premise to cloud hosted computing services.
Today in this article we will look at some top seven challenging Cloud Computing Security Threats, their impact, safeguard methods against cyber threats and so on.
Cyber Threats
It is important to understand where our systems could be at risk and what can be done about it to protect them and what kind of threats are prevailing in the cloud environment. Let’s look at seven top cyber threats which could affect your cloud computing services more in detail.
List of Key Cloud Computing Security Threats
1. Crytopjacking
It is a new form of cyber attack and can go undiagnosed. It moves around the practice of mining in crypto currencies such as Bitcoin. Cybercriminals have derived mechanisms to access cloud computing systems and use their computing power to mine crypto currencies. Hacker usage of your cloud resources will slow down performance of your operations but will not stop them totally so it is difficult to detect and usually associated with low processing capacity as the culprit.
2. Data Breaches
It is perhaps the most common threat to cloud computing as the issue of data leak or data loss is a major concern for organizations. Data breaches can be extremely damaging for business and loss of data violates General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which could cause businesses to pay hefty fines apart from losing customer trust and intellectual property loss.
3. DoS (Denial of Service)
Denial of Service attack could lead to shutting down of cloud services and make them unavailable both for customers and users and also for internal staff. Cybercriminals can flood your system with large amounts of web traffic which servers are not able to handle and crash.
4. Insider Threats
Insider Threats contribute to 43% breaches as per latest reports. Insider threats could be malicious such as staff members gone on rouge, some ex-employee who is disgruntled, it could be also due to negligence or human error. It is important to keep your staff well trained and tracking behaviour of employees to ensure they don’t commit crime against the organization.
Proper off-boarding process is crucial to ensure all their accesses are removed from any crucial data and credentials are no longer functioning in the system once they are separated. Many businesses get hacked due to former employees who are seeking revenge due to numerous reasons.
5. Vulnerable Applications
Sometimes systems are highly secure but not the 3rd party applications installed on them. Discouraging staff to download applications from non-trusted or unknown sites should be an important aspect to reduce this kind of risk. Prior approval of IT before installation of any application which is not in the approved list is mandatory and patching applications is also a crucial step in ensuring usage of secure applications.
6. Account Hijacking
The greatest threat to businesses who use cloud computing technologies is the challenge of hijacked accounts where criminals can gain access to the system via staff account and could potentially have full access to all information on servers without even the compromised account holder knowing about it. Cybercriminals use techniques such as password cracking and phishing emails to gain access to accounts. Access restrictions based on user role is key prevention for such kinds of attacks along with well aware staff on account security.
7. Inadequate Training
Majority of cyber security threats originated from outside but the issue is caused by problems from inside. It is essential to invest in training staff on cyber security risks. Organization people are the first line of defence against any kind of data breach or cyber attack, they need to be well prepared with latest information or relevant threats to businesses.