Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

A decade ago, many were reluctant to move to the cloud. Many felt like they would have to relinquish controls they had within their perimeters. That sentiment has since reversed, where organizations have become more comfortable with cloud technology. The newest concern is about corporate data leaving the cloud, especially as employees expect to work from anywhere. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have enabled people to stay productive from anywhere, but have also amplified security gaps.

In our last blog post How to Pass a FedRAMP Audit for SaaS Providers: Part 1 , we looked at what FedRAMP is and why it matters for SaaS providers. We also discussed a success story with one publicly traded Teleport SaaS customer who used Teleport to pass their FedRAMP audit.

Gartner made an interesting prediction just a few years ago: “Through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.” Practically every single cloud security failure can be fairly described as a misconfiguration of one kind or another. The 2025 end is kind of arbitrary, really; the prediction is likely to be true until the end of time. In my previous article, I discussed targeting these misconfigurations at their root.

The Sysdig Threat Research Team has detected an attack that can be attributed to the TeamTNT. The initial target was a Kubernetes pod exposed outside the network. Once access was gained, the malware attempted to steal AWS credentials using the EC2 instance metadata. TeamTNT is a threat actor that conducts large-scale attacks against virtual and cloud solutions, like Kubernetes and Docker.

For years, biotechs have been hampered by the administrative burden of seemingly endless amounts of diverse, siloed data, slow data ingestion, and security threats coming from internal and external sources. And yet, the life sciences industry continues to see double-digit growth. It’s now worth $285 billion a year, with no signs of slowing down.

Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity was released in May with nine sections outlining specific focus areas for security improvements. As we noted at the time, Netskope applauded the EO for how it placed significant emphasis on zero trust security adoption, mentioning it no fewer than 11 times, and insisting on proactive action.

In this blog, we’ve analyzed data from Netskope customers that include security settings of over 1 million entities in 156,737 Google Cloud (GCP) projects across hundreds of organizations (see Dataset and Methodology for more details on the dataset). We will specifically look at the configuration of service accounts, see what’s commonly occurring in the real world, and analyze how multiple security misconfigurations can lead to escalation of privileges and lateral movement.