Recent data breaches expose cloud security

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September 20, 2017

Almost 50% of CISOs say that they are very very anxious about the security implications of cloud. And recent data breaches support their anxiety. The main concern for a CISO is that his data is not in his control. Even after securing data with a lot of sophisticated tools, if the cloud platform is not secure enough the data is at risk.

If one thinks last year’s breach of over three billion records was bad enough, we have had enough breaches this year too. And some are massive and serious.

In a recent security breach of AWS S3, around 2,000 buckets were left open to the public as those cloud storage accounts were not set to private. About 126 billion files were available for anyone to access. Here the fault lies with the person who left it open though S3 accounts by default are set to private by AWS.

Recently a lot of breaches have happened due to this misconfiguration of S3 buckets.

The American media giant Viacom left one gigabyte of sensitive files publicly exposed, according to researchers from the cybersecurity firm UpGuard. The exposed files included Viacom’s secret cloud keys — information that a hacker could have used to take control of the company’s cloud servers.

Humans are prone to error. And when your data sits on cloud and is publicly available, this small human error has immense impact on the organization.

A few of the biggest breaches over the years are as follows

• Yahoo – 1.5 billion user accounts hacked in 2013-14.
• Adult Friend Finder – More than 412.2 million accounts hacked in 2016.
• eBay – 145 million users accounts hacked in 2014.
• Equifax – 143 million consumers data breached this month.

Some breaches this year

• Equifax data breach.
• AWannaCry ransomware plagues thousands in massive global cyberattack.
• CIA leak exposes thousands of documents on agency’s hacking efforts.
• Cloudflare vulnerability exposes encrypted customer sessions for months.
• The American media giant Viacom left one gigabyte of sensitive files publicly exposed.

Amazon S3 bucket breaches this year

• Dow Jones – Millions of customer data breached.
• Verizon confirmed a leak of data from some 6 million customers.

Data , the most precious thing, must always be in complete control of it’s owner.

Note: At Agni we provide you a Hybrid-Cloud that is in your CONTROL.

• Basheer Ahmed Khan
• Technical Consultant
• Agni Information Systems Pvt Ltd
• basheer@agniinfo.com
• mobile: +919900664967
• www.agniinfo.com