What is Cloud Application Security?

Cloud Application Security Threats

• Account hijacking: Weak passwords and data breaches often lead to legitimate accounts being compromised. If an attacker compromises an account, they can gain access to sensitive data and completely control cloud assets. 

• Credential exposure: A corollary to account hijacking is credential exposure. As the SolarWinds security breach demonstrated, exposing credentials in the cloud (GitHub in this case) can lead to account hijacking and a wide range of sophisticated long-term attacks. 

• Bots and automated attacks: Bots and malicious scanners are an unfortunate reality of exposing any service to the Internet. As a result, any cloud service or web-facing application must account for the threats posed by automated attacks. 

• Insecure APIs: APIs are one of the most common mechanisms for sharing data — both internally and externally — in modern cloud environments. However, because APIs are often both feature and data- rich, they are a popular attack surface for hackers. 

• Oversharing of data: Cloud data storage makes it trivial to share data using URLs. This greatly streamlines enterprise collaboration. However, it also increases the likelihood of assets being accessed by unauthorized or malicious users. 

• DoS attacks: Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against large enterprises have been a cybersecurity threat for a long time. With so many modern organizations dependent on public cloud services, attacks against cloud service providers can now have an exponential impact.  
• Misconfiguration: One of the most common reasons for data breaches is misconfigurations. The frequency of misconfiguration in the cloud is due in large part to the complexity involved in configuration management (which leads to disjointed manual processes) and access control across cloud providers. 
• Phishing and social engineering: Phishing and social engineering attacks that exploit the human side of enterprise security are one of the most frequently exploited attack vectors. 

• Complexity and lack of visibility: Because many enterprise environments are multi-cloud, the complexity of configuration management, granular monitoring across platforms, and access control often lead to disjointed workflows that involve manual configuration and limit visibility which further exacerbates cloud security challenges. 

Cloud Application Security Best Practices

Enterprises must take a holistic approach to improve their cloud security posture. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach that will work for every organization, but there are several cloud application security best practices that all enterprises can apply. 

Here are some of the most important cloud app security best practices enterprises should consider:

• Leverage MFA: Multi Factor authentication (MFA) is one of the most effective mechanisms for limiting the risk of account compromise. 

• Account for the human aspect: User error is one of the most common causes of data breaches. Taking a two-pronged approach of user education and implementing security tooling such as URL filters, anti-malware, and intelligent firewalls can significantly reduce the risk of social engineering leading to a catastrophic security issue. 

• Automate everything: Enterprises should automate cloud application monitoring, incident response, and configuration as much as possible. Manual workflows are error-prone and a common cause for oversight or leaked data. 

• Enforce the principle of least privilege: User accounts and applications should be configured to only access the assets required for their business function. Security policies should enforce the principle of least privilege across all cloud platforms. Leveraging enterprise identity management solutions and SSO (single-sign-on) can help enterprises scale this cloud application security best practice.

• Use holistic multi-cloud solutions: Modern enterprise infrastructure is complex and enterprises need complete visibility to ensure a strong security posture across all platforms. This means choosing visibility and security tooling that isn’t inherently tied to a given location (e.g. point appliances) or cloud vendor is essential. 

• Don’t depend on signature matching alone: Many threat detection engines and anti-malware solutions depend on signature matching and basic business logic to detect malicious behavior. While detecting known threats is useful, in practice depending only on basic signature matching for threat detection is a recipe for false positives that can lead to alert fatigue and unnecessarily slow down operations. Additionally, reliance on signature mapping alone means enterprises have little to no protection against zero-day threats that don’t already have a known signature. Security tooling that can analyze behavior in-context, for example by using an AI engine, can both reduce false positives and decrease the odds of a zero-day threat being exploited.