THE SECURITY RISKS BUSINESSES FACE WHEN USING CLOUD SERVICES
T he use of cloud services is commonplace in many businesses today, with companies like Amazon Web Services making it easy for corporates to migrate large amounts of data to the cloud.
Amazon launched its Snowmobile project towards the end of 2016, which allows businesses to move large amounts of data online via a connected shipping container which plugs into a network via multiple 40Gbps connections.
When using cloud services, though, there are multiple security risks which must be taken into account. Dominic White, CTO at SensePost, said the biggest shift is arguably the ability of employees to access services which were previously only available within the company.
This means a user who uses“ Password” for their password faces a greater risk of exposing a company due to the external availability of cloud services.“ The easy response to this is to use two-factor authentication, but that’ s not always bundled into cloud roll-out plans,” said White.
Prepare for the attack
White said companies often start using cloud services because individual employees are doing so.
“ The simplest example of this might be work communications going through personal Gmail accounts, more advanced examples might be developers building their own test environments within places such as Amazon’ s AWS cloud,” said White.
Taking resources online presents the risk of a business’ s services or infrastructure coming under attack, and, as was seen recently with the Mirai DDoS attacks, networked devices being hijacked by botnets.
“ The issue of the Mirai botnet was related to embedded hardware such as DVRs and cameras. On the one hand, it’ s a requirement for manufacturers to make these things more secure to prevent widespread takeovers such as this. However, an organisation can architect their network to prevent these devices from being easily contacted over the Internet. A good firewall architecture can do more to prevent these attacks than an IoT anti-virus or something equally silly.”
Companies also face an increased risk of coming under an online attack, if news headlines in recent months are a metric to go by.
Large DDoS attacks against DNS service providers like Dyn and gaming platforms like Sony’ s PlayStation Network have drawn much attention from the security and IT industries.
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