Detecting and mitigating misconfigurations in cloud services

Misconfigurations are a common threat when using cloud services. Under the shared responsibility model, some of the common reasons for misconfigurations in cloud services that fall under the customer's responsibility are as follows:

• Lack of knowledge in operating cloud services
• Human error
• Default settings being left in an unsecured state
• Large and complex environments being deployed in a very short time
• Fast and unmanaged changes to cloud environments

Here are some common examples of misconfigurations in cloud services:

• Having overly broad IAM policies (or role-based access control policies) – for example, default permissions that allow users to conduct actions on sensitive resources, or having more permissions than needed to accomplish their daily tasks
• Object storage being publicly accessible to anyone on the internet
• Snapshots and VM images being publicly accessible...