Examines how cloud misconfigurations lead to data breaches, unauthorized access, and compliance failures. Posts detail common mistakes such as open storage buckets, excessive permissions, and poor network controls, along with detection methods and remediation steps.
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In January 2025, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report team was already tracking a sharp rise in cloud-specific intrusions — a trend that accelerated throughout the year. By mid-2025, roughly 45% of all breaches involved cloud assets, up significantly from prior years. If your organization moved to the cloud and assumed
The Breach That Started With a Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket In 2023, Toyota disclosed that the vehicle data of 2.15 million customers had been publicly accessible for over a decade — because a cloud database was set to public instead of private. No sophisticated threat actor. No zero-day exploit. Just
A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In 2021, a researcher discovered that a misconfigured cloud storage bucket belonging to data analytics firm Cognyte had exposed more than five billion records. Capital One's infamous 2019 breach — a misconfigured web application firewall in AWS — cost them over
The Misconfigured Bucket That Exposed 540 Million Records In 2019, researchers at UpGuard discovered that Facebook user data — over 540 million records — sat exposed on misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets maintained by third-party app developers. Nobody hacked anything. Nobody exploited a zero-day. The data was simply left open to the public
In January 2024, Microsoft disclosed that a Russian threat actor group known as Midnight Blizzard had breached its corporate email systems — not through some exotic zero-day exploit, but through a password spray attack on a legacy test account that lacked multi-factor authentication. If Microsoft, a company that literally sells cloud
A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In early 2023, independent security researchers discovered yet another wave of publicly exposed Amazon S3 buckets leaking sensitive customer data — healthcare records, financial documents, personally identifiable information. None of these organizations were hacked in the traditional sense. They simply got their
The $65 Million Misconfiguration Nobody Saw Coming In March 2023, Toyota disclosed that a cloud misconfiguration had exposed vehicle data on 2.15 million customers for over a decade. A single cloud storage bucket, left publicly accessible, quietly leaked data from 2012 to 2023. Nobody noticed for ten years. That&
In April 2022, researchers at Palo Alto Unit 42 reported that nearly 99% of cloud user accounts, services, and resources grant excessive permissions — permissions that are granted but never used. That gap between what's allowed and what's needed is exactly where threat actors operate. If you&
In April 2022, researchers at Wiz discovered that Microsoft Azure's PostgreSQL Flexible Server had vulnerabilities allowing cross-account database access. They called it ExtraReplica, and it affected thousands of Azure databases. This wasn't a theoretical exercise — it was a real demonstration that security in cloud computing remains
A Single Checkbox Left Unchecked Cost Capital One $80 Million In 2019, a former AWS employee exploited a misconfigured web application firewall to access over 100 million Capital One customer records. The breach led to an FTC investigation, an $80 million fine from the OCC, and a $190 million class-action
