The number of cyberattacks continues to rise. PwC estimates that the number of businesses experiencing a data breach of more than $1 million in 2024 increased from 27% to 36%. While security professionals focus their attention on new technologies like generative AI for emerging threats, they often overlook the most common and defensible threats to cloud data security – misconfiguration.
Industry research shows that 73% of cloud data breaches are the result of basic system misconfigurations. Vulnerabilities stem from leaving a bucket publicly accessible for debugging, granting overly broad permissions in access management, opening a firewall “temporarily” and forgetting to close it, and similar actions. Human error is a far greater threat to cybersecurity than hackers or even automated attacks.
The ”oops” factor has become the biggest security headache for IT professionals. Cloud configurations are continuously changing. A new microservice may be deployed, a new debugging bucket created, or access credentials changed to troubleshoot a problem. Every change to the infrastructure presents another opportunity for exploitation. A misconfiguration means exposure, and hackers are continuously scanning for exposed resources that can give them system access.
If misconfiguration is the primary source of cloud breaches, organizations must reassess their security approach. Rather than conducting monthly or quarterly checks, they need a security strategy that keeps pace with the cloud’s continuous changes, eliminates blind spots, and validates every risk before it results in a breach. The Astra Cloud Vulnerability Scanner was developed to spot misconfigurations before they become problems.
The Growing Misconfiguration Problem
Unlike conventional network systems, cloud infrastructures are in a constant state of flux. Resources are spun up and removed as needed, storage needs change, permissions are updated, and services are added. AWS, Azure, GCP, and other cloud service providers continually update hundreds of configuration parameters. This “configuration drift” creates changes that can rapidly deviate from best practices and policies, making it difficult to maintain data security.
Identity and access management (IAM) is one of the biggest problem areas. IAM is a powerful cloud security tool and often the one that is poorly managed. IAM sprawl is an ongoing issue as user permissions are updated and added but infrequently removed. According to Astra pentesting, 78% of the critical risk issues in cloud infrastructures are related to IAM or policy exposures. Some of the most common IAM problems are wildcard permissions, overly broad role permissions, forgotten service accounts, policies that allow privilege escalation, and confidential data exposed in logs, repositories, or runtimes.
It's also common to maintain multi-cloud infrastructures that span AWS, Azure, GCP, and other public and private clouds. However, maintaining a multi-cloud system requires managing different naming conventions, security defaults, permission models, and logging behaviors. When juggling different systems, something is likely to slip through the cracks.
Keeping pace with DevOps teams is another challenge. DevOps is continually shipping hotfixes, new services, and feature flags, with new integrations and deployments every few hours. If the security team is applying quarterly scans, manual reviews, and irregular compliance audits, they can’t keep up with DevOps changes. Legacy cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools can help keep track, but they also tend to issue thousands of alerts using slow or only periodic scans, and they have no validation of exploitability. CSPM tools also have little integration with developer workflows.
The Misconfigurations Behind Most Breaches
Of course, every cloud service provider has its own quirks, and there are different security concerns for different providers. However, the most common misconfigurations that lead to data breaches are fairly consistent.
- Publicly exposed buckets are commonplace. Buckets are often created to handle debugging or for other purposes. A publicly available bucket can expose entire datasets if it isn’t reverted.
- Over-permissive IAM roles are another common issue. Even with best practices, IT professionals often open access to resources for special projects or to facilitate operations, only to forget about them later. Hackers actively search for wild card permissions, forgotten accounts, and privilege-escalation paths.
- Misconfigured firewalls and security groups are also common weak points. Open ports (e.g., 0.0.0.0/0) are attractive points of entry for hackers. Unsecured API endpoints with missing authentication or overly permissive tokens are also common sources of data loss.
- Lack of data encryption is another common compliance failure. Data at rest and in motion should be encrypted to prevent unauthorized access.
- Improper logging, or no logging at all, leads to blind spots that can be exploited. Without logs, there is no visibility into potential system weaknesses.
The Need for a New Kind of Security Solution
Since cloud configurations are continually changing, continuous security monitoring is also necessary. Maintaining ongoing visibility into cloud system security requires:
- Agentless visibility across all cloud accounts. Teams need to be able to onboard quickly and recognize risks in advance.
- Continuous, change-triggered scanning. Every new role, rule, bucket, and permission update must be identified and validated as it occurs.
- Accurate validation of findings. Promoting visibility can result in a significant amount of added noise, so the system must be able to distinguish between exploitable risks and theoretical threats.
- Context-aware prioritization. Risks should be ranked based on exposure paths, data sensitivity, potential privilege escalation, and related factors.
- Integration between developer workflows. Monitoring DevOps activities is essential to identify and correct misconfigurations before they reach production.
As cloud scale accelerates and the attack surface expands, it’s essential to move from occasional to continuous security checks. The goal is to close the gap between visibility and validation, transitioning from a reactive to a proactive response.
That’s the approach Astra has taken with its new Cloud Vulnerability Scanner, which combines agentless onboarding, continuous monitoring and analysis, and offensive-grade validation. Astra automatically scans the cloud environment for changes, such as when a bucket is made public, a policy is modified, a role is created, or a port is opened. Misconfigurations are detected as they occur, eliminating the need for weekly or quarterly checks.
Astra’s Cloud Vulnerability Scanner has over 400 misconfiguration checks and 3,000 automated vulnerability tests. It covers configuration issues such as IAM exposure, storage settings, network and security group issues, API endpoint weaknesses, encryption gaps, and policy drift.
The Astra Offensive Security Engine streamlines proactive security management by delivering clear, actionable insights. The Security Engine generates thousands of “maybe” scenarios to identify exploitable misconfigurations and remove false positives, making it easy to prioritize configuration issues without guesswork.
Misconfigurations are a natural byproduct of any cloud computing system, and eliminating them is the biggest opportunity to reduce security risk. When changes occur at speed and scale, it pays to have a vulnerability scanner that features agentless visibility, continuous change-triggered scanning, and validation-first threat detection. Misconfiguration may account for 73% of cloud data breaches, but the right detection tools can help keep your organization out of that statistic.