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Cloud Security

Cloud security content covers the tools, policies, and best practices needed to protect data, applications, and infrastructure hosted in cloud environments. Topics include shared responsibility models, cloud misconfiguration prevention, encryption, and monitoring across public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments.

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Cloud Storage Security Risks

Cloud Storage Security Risks: What's Actually Exposing You

A Single Misconfigured Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In 2021, Cognyte left an unsecured database containing over 5 billion records — scraped from previous breaches — sitting in a cloud storage instance with no authentication required. Anyone with a browser could reach it. That's not a sophisticated nation-state attack. That&

Carl B. Johnson May 09, 2026 5 min read
Shadow IT Risks

Shadow IT Risks: The Threats Hiding in Your Network

In 2023, a midsize healthcare company discovered that an employee had been syncing patient records to a personal Dropbox account for over two years. No malicious intent — just convenience. The result was a HIPAA violation, a six-figure settlement, and a brutal lesson in shadow IT risks that the organization'

Carl B. Johnson May 04, 2026 5 min read
Shadow IT

What Is Shadow IT? The Hidden Risk Draining Your Security

Your Employees Are Building a Second Network You Can't See A marketing manager signs up for an AI writing tool using her corporate email. A developer spins up an AWS instance on a personal account to test code faster. A sales rep stores client contracts in a personal

Carl B. Johnson May 01, 2026 5 min read
Securing Cloud Applications

Securing Cloud Applications: A Practical 2025 Guide

The Snowflake Breach Changed How I Think About Cloud Risk In mid-2024, threat actors compromised over 165 organizations by exploiting stolen credentials against Snowflake cloud accounts that lacked multi-factor authentication. Ticketmaster, AT&T, Santander — massive names, massive data losses. The root cause wasn't some exotic zero-day. It

Carl B. Johnson Apr 22, 2025 7 min read
SaaS Security Best Practices

SaaS Security Best Practices: A 2025 Field Guide

In January 2025, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an emergency directive after threat actors exploited misconfigured SaaS environments across multiple federal agencies. The attackers didn't need sophisticated zero-day exploits. They walked in through overprivileged service accounts, dormant API tokens, and single-factor authentication — problems that every

Carl B. Johnson Apr 22, 2025 7 min read
Cloud Storage Security Risks

Cloud Storage Security Risks: What Your Team Ignores

A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In early 2023, security researchers discovered that a misconfigured cloud storage instance at Toyota had been leaking vehicle location data for over a decade — affecting 2.15 million customers. That wasn't a sophisticated nation-state attack. It was a configuration

Carl B. Johnson Nov 03, 2023 7 min read
Securing Cloud Applications

Securing Cloud Applications: A Practical Field Guide

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&

Carl B. Johnson Nov 03, 2023 7 min read
Shadow IT Risks

Shadow IT Risks: The Hidden Threat Draining Your Budget

The App Your Marketing Team Installed Last Tuesday Could Cost You Millions In 2022, a mid-size healthcare company discovered that an employee had been syncing patient records to a personal Dropbox account for three years. No malicious intent — they just wanted to work from home more easily. The resulting HIPAA

Carl B. Johnson Nov 03, 2023 7 min read
SaaS Security

SaaS Security Best Practices: A Hands-On Guide

The Breach That Started With a Single SaaS Login In January 2023, Mailchimp disclosed its second major breach in less than a year. The cause? A threat actor used social engineering to trick an employee into handing over credentials to an internal tool. That single compromised SaaS login exposed 133

Carl B. Johnson Sep 29, 2023 7 min read
Security in Cloud Computing

Security in Cloud Computing: What Actually Goes Wrong

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

Carl B. Johnson May 26, 2022 7 min read