Cloud infrastructure offers tremendous flexibility and scalability. That same flexibility creates countless opportunities for dangerous misconfigurations. A single wrong setting can expose your entire organisation to attack.
Public S3 buckets containing sensitive data make headlines regularly. Someone forgets to set proper access controls, and terabytes of customer information become publicly accessible. Automated scanners constantly probe cloud services, discovering these misconfigurations within hours of creation.
Default configurations prioritise functionality over security. Cloud platforms ship with permissive settings because they can’t know your specific security requirements. Many organisations deploy resources without changing these defaults, unknowingly creating vulnerabilities.
Identity and access management complexity leads to overly permissive policies. Cloud IAM systems offer incredible granularity, but that complexity overwhelms many teams. Rather than crafting precise policies, they grant broad permissions, figuring they’ll tighten them later. Later rarely comes. Professional Azure penetration testing identifies these IAM misconfigurations before attackers exploit them.
Unused and forgotten resources accumulate over time. Development teams spin up test environments, then move on to other projects without cleaning up. These zombie resources sit unpatched and unmonitored, providing convenient attack vectors.
William Fieldhouse, Director of Aardwolf Security Ltd, explains: “Cloud security requires a fundamentally different mindset than traditional infrastructure. When we conduct Azure penetration testing or AWS assessments, misconfigurations consistently represent the lowest-hanging fruit for attackers.”
Logging and monitoring disabled by default create blind spots. Without comprehensive logging, organisations can’t detect or investigate security incidents. Attackers operate freely in environments where nobody’s watching.
Network security groups and firewall rules frequently allow excessive access. Teams open ports wider than necessary, or allow access from the entire internet when only specific IP ranges should connect. Each overly permissive rule expands your attack surface unnecessarily.
Encryption at rest sounds simple, but implementation varies. Many cloud storage services support encryption, but it’s optional. Data sits unencrypted by default until someone explicitly enables encryption. Sensitive data deserves encryption always, not as an afterthought.
Database instances exposed to the internet represent another common misconfiguration. Databases should sit in private subnets, accessible only from application servers. Yet we regularly discover production databases accepting connections from anywhere.
Multi-factor authentication should be mandatory for cloud console access. Password-based authentication alone provides insufficient protection. Compromised credentials grant attackers complete control over your cloud environment. Comprehensive AWS penetration testing reveals how attackers might chain multiple small misconfigurations into a serious compromise.
Cloud security posture management tools help, but they’re not magic bullets. They identify misconfigurations automatically, but someone must prioritise and remediate the findings. Without dedicated ownership, alerts pile up unaddressed.
