Cloud-Native Breaches Unlike Typical Malware Attacks: McAfee report

McAfee has released Cloud-Native: The Infrastructure-as-a-Service Adoption and Risk Report, covering new research on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) incidents in the cloud.

According to the survey, 99 percent of IaaS misconfigurations are undetected—indicating awareness around the most common entry point to new “Cloud-Native Breaches” (CNB) is extremely low.

“In the rush toward IaaS adoption, many organisations overlook the shared responsibility model for the cloud and assume that security is taken care of completely by the cloud provider,” said Rajiv Gupta, Senior Vice President, Cloud Security, McAfee. “However, the security of what customers put in the cloud, most importantly sensitive data, is their responsibility. To defend against the new era of Cloud-Native Breaches, organisations need to use security tools that are cloud-native, purpose-built for cloud security and address their portion of the shared responsibility model.”

IaaS breaches don’t look like your typical malware incident, instead leveraging native features of cloud infrastructure to land the attack, expand to adjacent cloud instances, and exfiltrate sensitive data. In most cases they “land” by exploiting configuration errors in how the cloud environment was set up. This research sheds light on the need for security tools to keep up with IaaS-native issues, especially the ability to continuously audit IaaS deployments for initial misconfiguration and configuration drift over time.

The report also revealed a disconnect between practitioners and heads of businesses. It showed that 90 percent of companies have experienced some security issue in IaaS, misconfiguration or otherwise. Yet twice as many practitioners believe they’ve never experienced an issue compared to their C-Level leadership. Only 26 percent are equipped to audit for misconfigurations in IaaS, which likely accounts for the lack of visibility. It is possible the speed of cloud adoption is putting some security practitioners behind, lacking the tools they need to stop CNBs, even while their leadership perceives greater risk.

The survey further discovered that cloud data loss in IaaS was on the rise. Incidents triggered by data loss prevention (DLP) rules in IaaS, such PCI data entering a storage object with public-read access, are up 248 percent year-over-year. Forty-two percent of the storage objects with DLP incidents were misconfigured.

Another key finding was that IaaS is the new shadow IT. Seventy-six percent of respondents said they use multiple IaaS providers, yet data sourced from actual cloud usage shows 92 percent actually do. Incidents will go under the radar if companies aren’t aware of where their infrastructure lives.

The report is based on McAfee’s survey of 1,000 global enterprise organisations about security issues in IaaS, with a focus on misconfigurations which in some cases have left millions of customer records and intellectual property open to theft. The company also analysed its own customers’ use of IaaS through anonymised, aggregated event data across millions of cloud users and billions of events.