The Cloud Misconfigurations Behind Most Breaches

Wildcard permissions granted "temporarily" during a migration are the single most common finding. Roles accumulate privileges and never lose them, service accounts hold administrative rights for a task they performed once, and human users keep standing access to production.

Public object storage remains a steady source of data loss, usually because a bucket was opened for a legitimate reason and never closed. The same applies to management ports, database endpoints and internal dashboards reachable from the internet because a security group was widened during troubleshooting.

Long-lived access keys in code, CI variables or laptops are the currency of cloud intrusions. Replace them with short-lived federated credentials wherever the platform supports it, and scan repositories continuously rather than at review time.

Finally, control-plane logging must be enabled in every region and account and shipped somewhere the account owner cannot delete. Without it, an investigation cannot establish what an attacker did.