Despite the growing interest in cloud accounts by opportunistic and state-sponsored actors, too many organizations fail to implement basic security measures to protect their cloud apps, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) for administrators and users. This is the concerning finding of a report recently released by Microsoft, according to which just 22% of Azure Active Directory customers implement strong authentication mechanisms such as MFA or passwordless authentication.

Microsoft released a valuable new Azure feature in December of 2021: custom security attributes. This feature is still in preview. Custom security attributes enable organizations to define new attributes to meet their needs. These attributes can be used to store information or, more notably, implement access controls with Azure attribute-based access control (ABAC). Azure ABAC, which is also in preview, enables an organization to define access rules based on the value of an object’s attribute.

Protecting cloud workloads from zero-day vulnerabilities like Log4Shell is a challenge that every organization faces. When a vulnerability is published, organizations can try to identify impacted artifacts through software composition analysis, but even if they’re able to identify all impacted areas, the patching process can be cumbersome and time-consuming. As we saw with Log4Shell, this can become even more complicated when the vulnerability is nearly ubiquitous.

Enterprises continue to embrace cloud technology, some driven by the desire to offload rising hardware costs and operational overhead, others enticed by the promise of scalable, on-demand, practically infinite capacity and capability only a few clicks away.

Data loss can cause tremendous damage to a business. It diminishes trust in your brand and can lead to financial losses from lawsuits, fines for non-compliance, and theft of intellectual property. Data loss prevention (DLP) is the set of practices and tools designed to prevent data leakage through intentional and unintentional misuse. These practices and tools include encryption, detection, preventative measures, educational pop-ups, and even machine learning to identify vulnerabilities.

The benefits of cloud computing are causing the adoption of cloud services by companies of all sizes to increase each year. The reduction of operating costs, time to market, ease of use, and reliability are some of the most significant benefits. However, the shared responsibility model must be taken into consideration. Cloud breaches are already everywhere and it doesn’t look like they’re going to slow down anytime soon.

In the latter part of December 2021, WhiteSource Diffend detected the new release of a package called @maui-mf/app-auth. This package used a vector of attack that was similar to the server side request forgery (SSRF) attack against Capital One in 2019, in which a server was tricked into executing commands on behalf of a remote user, thereby enabling the user to treat the server as a proxy for requests and gain access to non-public endpoints.

Just over three years ago, Joe DePalo joined Netskope as Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering. He had most recently led the infrastructure design and build-out at AWS, the world’s largest public cloud, and prior to that, engineering and operations for one of the largest content delivery networks (CDNs) at Limelight Networks.

State-sponsored threat actors continue to exploit legitimate cloud services. In their latest campaign, uncovered by Malwarebytes during January 2022, the North Korean group Lazarus (AKA HIDDEN COBRA) has been carrying out spear phishing attacks, delivering a malicious document masquerading as a job opportunity from Lockheed Martin (37% of malware is now delivered via Office documents).