Posts Tagged "Threats"

The cloud. It’s convenient, inexpensive, scalable, and easy to use. Because most businesses can’t achieve the economy of scale effect common to large cloud providers, it’s cheaper to use these services than duplicating their facilities in-house. But there is a big downside to the cloud: It has security risks.

A large cloud service may contain the data of hundreds of businesses. This presents a tempting target for cyber criminals who appreciate the monetary worth of this information or who simply desire to inflict widespread damage. They can gain entry by exploiting whatever security weaknesses they find. Here are three of them:

Compromised Login Credentials

Criminals have many ways of gaining access to login credentials. They might use password cracking software that persistently tries different password guesses until they achieve a successful login. This is highly effective against weak passwords. People may be tricked into using their credentials on fake login pages, or the credentials might be stored on a mobile device that’s subsequently lost or stolen. Credentials can be obtained using visual hacking, in which a person stands behind someone logging into an account and records the keystrokes with a phone video recorder.

Data Leakage

Not all cloud service providers are created equal. Some may have employees who are negligent or just prone to making mistakes. Even though you would never hire such a person to handle your data, the security and safety of your critical business data are nevertheless in this person’s hands. An accidental transfer of your data to an unsecured server exposed to the Internet is quite possible.

Poor Data Isolation

Cloud physical resources such as CPU, networking, and databases may be shared between multiple users (tenants). The activities and data of any one tenant should not be visible or accessible to the others. In addition, if one tenant is infected (by ransomware, for example), the problem shouldn’t spread to the other tenants. However, these problems can happen when poor data isolation is in place. If a tenant’s poor login credential management allows a hacker to gain access to his data, your data may be compromised next in such an environment.

The above are by no means a complete listing of cloud security weaknesses. The main takeaway from this is the importance of carefully vetting cloud service providers from a security standpoint before using them. Secure cloud storage is an absolute necessity today because your business and reputation depend on it. WHOA.com takes security seriously. We use multiple layers of security to protect our networks from all threats. To learn more about this, please contact us.

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