Threat actors are getting more adept at exploiting common, everyday issues in the cloud, including misconfigurations, weak credentials, lack of authentication, unpatched vulnerabilities, and malicious open-source software (OSS) packages. Meanwhile, security teams take an average of 145 hours to solve alerts, with 80% of cloud alerts triggered by just 5% of security rules in most environments.
That’s according to the Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report, Volume 7, which analyzed the workloads in 210,000 cloud accounts across 1,300 different organizations to gain a comprehensive look at the current cloud security landscape. It cited a small set of risky cloud behaviors that are repeatedly observed in organizations, warning that the average time to remediate alerts (roughly six days) provides a lengthy window of opportunity for adversaries to exploit cloud vulnerabilities.