Despite advances in cloud computing, there are still many cloud security issues. However, by adopting certain practices, the cloud remains the most reliable IT option for businesses.
Here are the common threats or risks involved when adopting to cloud services:
Data Leaks
No system can provide complete security. Even if cloud business providers guarantee 100% secured system, the real fact is the systems can never offer foolproof security.
Data leaks can occur within virtual machines which can pose unpredictable risks such as stealing of customers’ personal information or confidential company data.
Because of this reason, businesses always have ambiguity in adopting to the cloud solutions. Unfortunately, measures to prevent data leaks or theft can worsen these threats. For example, encryption protects data from theft, but the loss of the encryption key results in the irretrievable loss of data. Similarly, regular copies help prevent data loss, but expose them to theft.
Data Loss
A data leak is usually the result of an external or internal attack on someone’s system. However, data loss differs from lead and can occur when a hard drive stops working and the user doesn’t have a backup, or when an encryption key is lost. There are methods to avoid these losses, but none of these methods can be 100% trusted.
Account Theft
Phishing, exploiting software vulnerabilities or password loss can lead to cloud account theft and mainly business loss. An intruder who takes control of an account can manipulate the data as per his/her intention, communicate with customers or send them to competing sites.
Hackers can also take over an entire service and compromise its confidentiality, integrity or availability. There are several ways to avoid this type of inconvenience. The best method remains to prohibit the sharing of identifiers between users, including trusted business partners, and to implement two-factor authentication techniques.
Unsecured APIs
To prevent anonymous users from attacking cloud services, a public API has been put in place to define how third parties connect an application to a service and verify the identity of that third party. Leading web developers, including Twitter and Google, have collaborated to create OAuth, an open authorization service for web services to control third-party access.
OAuth became a standard Internet Engineering Task Force in 2010, and Version 2.0 is used by tech giants such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft. However, there is no fully secure public API. Relying on OAuth may expose a company to security issues related to the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of its services.
Denial of Service
DDOS attacks results in sending millions of automated requests to a service in order to overload it. In case of cloud service, the company can receive an astronomical invoice for the resources used during the attack. These attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to detect before it is too late.
Malicious employees
A company is never safe from a fraudulent employee who is willing to steal unscrupulous data from within the company. To avoid this disaster, the best course of action is to keep the encryption keys on a physical storage medium and not on the cloud. Firms that put their security in the hands of a cloud provider are exposed to increased risk.
Abuse of cloud services
Cracking an encryption key using limited hardware can take years. However, hackers also have access to cloud services, and can use cloud servers to crack these keys in minutes. They can also use these servers to launch malware, DDoS attacks, or to distribute pirated software.
Cloud service providers have a responsibility to avoid such abuses, but it is difficult to detect inappropriate uses. However, companies should check how a cloud service provider reacts to such abuse before choosing it as a partner.
Lack of precautions
Many companies are adopting cloud without really understanding what this decision implies. If it does not fully understand a supplier’s offer, it does not know what to expect in the event of an incident, encryption and monitoring. The firm is therefore exposed to increased risks.
Shared technologies
Attacks on shared cloud infrastructures compromise more than the attacked client. The entire company is exposed to data leaks. This is the reason, a thorough defensive strategy and monitoring measures are recommended.
Although no network systems (file systems or cloud or hybrid systems) are completely secured, but cloud systems are actually worth to look at because of the other benefits and security.
