Provides actionable guidance for securing cloud deployments across major platforms. Topics include identity and access management, logging and monitoring, secure architecture design, and policy enforcement to maintain a strong cloud security posture.
posts
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
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
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&
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
A Single Checkbox Left 100 Million Records Exposed In 2019, a former cloud engineer exploited a misconfigured web application firewall at Capital One and accessed over 100 million customer records stored in AWS S3 buckets. The breach cost Capital One over $270 million in settlements and remediation. The root cause
A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In 2023, researchers at Cybernews discovered what they called one of the largest data exposures ever — over 3 billion records sitting in an open cloud storage instance. No sophisticated hack. No zero-day exploit. Just a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket with public
The Misconfiguration That Exposed 100 Million Records Updated for 2026 In 2019, a former Amazon Web Services employee exploited a misconfigured web application firewall to steal personal data from over 100 million Capital One customers and applicants. The breach cost Capital One more than $270 million in settlements and remediation.
