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Tenable's 2025 Cloud Security Risk Report has revealed a concerning trend: a significant percentage of public cloud storage resources are exposing sensitive data. The study found that nearly one in ten publicly accessible cloud storage buckets contain sensitive information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Intellectual Property (IP), Payment Card Industry (PCI) data, and Protected Health Information (PHI). Worryingly, 97% of this exposed data is classified as restricted or confidential. This highlights the ongoing challenge organizations face in properly securing their cloud environments despite increased awareness of cloud security risks.
Researchers found that misconfigured access settings and overly permissive policies are major contributing factors to these exposures. For instance, more than half of organizations (54%) store at least one secret directly in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Container Service (ECS) task definitions. Similarly, a significant portion of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Run and Microsoft Azure Logic Apps workflows are also exposed. Tenable emphasizes the need for automated data discovery and classification, elimination of public access by default, enterprise-grade secrets management, and identity-intelligent Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to mitigate these risks.
While the report highlights the risks from insecure cloud configurations, it also points to some positive developments. The number of organizations with "toxic cloud trilogies" – workloads that are publicly exposed, critically vulnerable, and highly privileged – has declined from 38% to 29% over the past year. However, this still represents a substantial risk. Tenable stresses that exposed secrets and sensitive data are systemic risks that must be eliminated to prevent data exfiltration and environment takeover, emphasizing that attackers often exploit public access, steal embedded secrets, or abuse overprivileged identities to compromise cloud environments.
References :
Researchers found that misconfigured access settings and overly permissive policies are major contributing factors to these exposures. For instance, more than half of organizations (54%) store at least one secret directly in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Container Service (ECS) task definitions. Similarly, a significant portion of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Run and Microsoft Azure Logic Apps workflows are also exposed. Tenable emphasizes the need for automated data discovery and classification, elimination of public access by default, enterprise-grade secrets management, and identity-intelligent Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to mitigate these risks.
While the report highlights the risks from insecure cloud configurations, it also points to some positive developments. The number of organizations with "toxic cloud trilogies" – workloads that are publicly exposed, critically vulnerable, and highly privileged – has declined from 38% to 29% over the past year. However, this still represents a substantial risk. Tenable stresses that exposed secrets and sensitive data are systemic risks that must be eliminated to prevent data exfiltration and environment takeover, emphasizing that attackers often exploit public access, steal embedded secrets, or abuse overprivileged identities to compromise cloud environments.
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References :
- www.cybersecuritydive.com: Cloud storage buckets leaking secret data despite security improvements
- Tenable Blog: Cybersecurity Snapshot: Tenable Report Spotlights Cloud Exposures, as Google Catches Pro-Russia Hackers Impersonating Feds
- www.itpro.com: Tenable report shows that organizations are failing to configure storage effectively – and may have a false sense of security
Classification:
- HashTags: #CloudSecurity #DataExposure #RiskManagement
- Company: Tenable
- Target: Businesses
- Product: Cloud Security
- Feature: Cloud Security Risk Report
- Type: DataBreach
- Severity: Medium