Cloud computing has become so popular nowadays that most businesses and organizations employ these platforms as part of their operational processes, specifically storing, sharing, and using information to provide services to customers and clients. Cybersecurity professionals know that any technology that has gained popularity in the digital world will eventually catch the eye of malevolent cyber actors and become their next target.
Cloud computing is no exception to this fact, as evidenced by the rise in cloud computing cyberattacks. In 2021, for instance, financial services were targeted in 50% of the top 10 cloud incidents, including incidents in the United States, Singapore, China, France, Canada, and Australia, meaning a significant economic impact. With this looming threat, companies and organizations must ramp up their security and invest in innovative solutions to protect their cloud assets.
Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting cloud platforms.
While cloud computing began as an option for backup storage, the technology has evolved into an all-encompassing computing platform that most businesses and organizations rely on to keep their operations running smoothly. The importance of the technology is highlighted by the dominance of big tech firms such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which now offer cloud computing solutions.
With businesses worldwide shifting a sizable chunk of their computing processes to the cloud, cybercriminals have already realized the profit potential and are increasingly targeting cloud platforms. In 2020, cloud computing platforms became the third most targeted cyber environment, with cloud cyberattacks accounting for 20 percent of all cyberattacks that year. This underscores the need for cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAAP) to secure organizations’ cloud deployments.
Recent cloud attacks
Some examples of attacks perpetrated on online services and cloud computing platforms resulted in expensive and potentially catastrophic data exposures.
Accenture, August 2021. Unfortunately, this was mostly in plain text! The company was the victim of the LockBit ransomware attack, in which the attackers claimed to have stolen 6TB of data and asked for $50 million in ransom. This includes Accenture’s customer accounts, which supposedly included 40,000 passwords on a backup database.
Kaseya, July of 2021. An IT solutions provider, Kaseya, reported that its unified remote monitoring and network perimeter security tool had been breached. Attackers targeted Kaseya’s services, from managed service providers to downstream customers, to gain administrative control over them. Apart from disrupting the company’s SaaS services, the breach also made on-premises solutions utilized by its customers vulnerable. The company rolled out its detection tool, which clients use to analyze endpoints for vulnerabilities.
Cognate, May 2021. A cyber analytics firm, Cognyte, fell victim to data theft. Hackers exposed 5 billion records stored on a database that did not utilize authentication. These included names, email addresses, home addresses, and passwords. What’s worse, search engines could crawl and index the leaked information.
Facebook, April 2021. Hundreds of millions of user records were breached and exposed on Amazon AWS. This was largely brought about by the fact that most app developers using the social platform can pull data such as user IDs, friend lists, location check-ins, and even unprotected Facebook account passwords.
Deploying a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) to secure your data and infrastructure
While adopting a cloud-based infrastructure undoubtedly has benefits, it also creates new security challenges for organizations and businesses. Previously, enterprises had to rely on a patchwork of independent security tools to keep the bad guys at bay, which may no longer be as effective today as cybercriminals have also become more technologically sophisticated in their operations.
That is where CNAPP comes in. The acronym was coined by Gartner and popularized with the release of their Innovation Insight for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms report. CNAPP will consolidate security tools while increasing visibility and control in cloud environments while making it possible to integrate security principles across all stages of the development lifecycle, from development to integration, deployment, and production operations.
Here are some of the benefits.
A unified cloud security solution. Implementing security in public cloud environments could be challenging as it involves the collaboration of development, security, infrastructure, and operations teams working on different processes. Sometimes, improperly defined roles and policies can lead to gaps in security, which bad actors can exploit.
One of the benefits of CNAPP is that it delivers a unified approach to security for cloud-native applications across distributed clouds. Using a single security platform makes it easier for team members to collaborate and respond to issues efficiently with its visual attack flow graphs that feature quick alerts, recommendations, and remediation guidance.
Reduction of operational complexity and costs. Aside from potentially creating gaps, multiple security tools can make processes unnecessarily complex and even increase overhead costs. CNAPP can help businesses reduce complexity and costs by replacing traditional security tools such as DLP, IaC scanning, CMDB, CSPM, CWPP, and CIEM. It boosts efficiency by prioritizing risks the security team should handle first.
Improved visibility. Businesses and organizations usually deploy applications and run workloads across multiple cloud platforms. Using the native security controls of these public cloud providers tends to result in limited visibility, inconsistent security policies, levels of protection, and even incomplete reporting of the threat landscape.
Thankfully, this won’t be an issue with CNAPP, as it provides visibility and insight by contextualizing information across an enterprise’s multi-cloud application infrastructure. This includes insights from PaaS services, containers, serverless workloads, and development environments. The capability allows the system to identify risks early in the development cycle and continuously monitor for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security issues.
Speedier resolution of issues. Security testing is usually done after the development stage but before sending the application into production in a traditional development environment. This slows down the pace of the DevOps process and, as the security team struggles to keep up with the development team, might cause coding mistakes to go undetected and potentially exploited.
CNAPP makes it easier to identify compliance issues or misconfigurations in the development stage as it allows the integration of popular IDE platforms such as VS Code and DevOps tools like Jenkins and GitHub. This enables security and developer teams to investigate and handle potential risks before exploiting them. SecOps ecosystems, such as ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Splunk, can seamlessly integrate into the CNAPP to trigger tickets and alerts so assigned teams can quickly respond and effectively remedy the situation.
The takeaway
The race between hackers and cybersecurity experts who defend corporate networks will likely remain a cat-and-mouse game for years. Hackers will always try to find a way to breach the defenses set up by businesses and organizations; in contrast, cybersecurity experts will always try to be one step ahead of the game by developing new and innovative ways to secure networks.
Given such a scenario, cybersecurity will remain a key priority for enterprises. Investing in protection solutions will be a must to prevent data breaches and the problems they are bound to create for companies with cloud processes. Investments in the latest security systems must be made to keep sensitive customer info safe and their reputation and brand image intact.
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