CloudKnox Security released the results of the cloud security industry's first
State of Cloud Entitlements Report. The findings from CloudKnox, leader of the
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) space, highlight significant
risks for organizations using the major cloud providers, Amazon Web Services
(AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and VMware vSphere for their multi-
or hybrid cloud environments.
The extensive CloudKnox Threat
Labs research, which includes the participation of more than 150 global
organizations, makes clear there is an industry-wide Cloud Permissions Gap
crisis, leaving countless organizations at risk due to improper Identity and
Access Management (IAM). The report findings underscore the fact that attackers
can leverage over-privileged identities to traverse laterally, elevate
permissions and cause extensive data exfiltration.
"The focus on digital
transformation over the last few years-and accelerated throughout 2020-has led
to a significant delta between permissions granted and permissions used in the
cloud. This Cloud Permissions Gap is a massive contributing factor to the rise
of both accidental and malicious threats for organizations of all sizes," said
Raj Mallempati, COO of CloudKnox. "Permissions misuse or abuse can allow both
human and machine identities to create and destroy portions of the cloud
infrastructure; and without right-sizing these permissions, enforcing least
privilege and Zero Trust access, these identities have the potential to become
CISOs' worst nightmares."
Among the State of Cloud
Entitlements report findings, the data underscores this cause for concern.
CloudKnox observed more than 40% of AWS roles were reported as inactive or over
permissioned, putting these organizations at risk of a costly breach should a
bad actor breach one of these roles. More than 70% of Azure subscriptions have
identities with over-permissive Contributor roles, giving hackers the
opportunity to control IAM should they gain access as a Contributor. Further,
more than 75% of enterprises using GCP have identities' permission creep
ranging from viewer to owner. CloudKnox Security also found 90% of enterprises
using vSphere have misconfigurations that can lead to critical level one failures.
Key Cloud Provider Risks from
CloudKnox's State of Cloud Entitlements Report include:
Amazon Web Services
- More than 95% of identities are using less than 2% of
permissions granted.
- Two-thirds of most enterprises have Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2) instances with access to all Simple Storage Service (S3)
buckets.
- More than 50% of enterprises have identities with
privilege escalations ability to elevate to super admin roles.
Azure
- More than 90% of identities are using less than 2% of
permissions granted.
- More than 85% of enterprises have over-permissive
identities left orphaned after projects are terminated.
- 65% of all enterprises have anonymous public read
access enabled for blob containers in production environments.
Google Cloud Platform
- More than 90% of identities are using less than 5% of
permissions granted.
- More than 80% of projects have service accounts
(including Google managed) with over-permissive Owner/Editor roles either
directly attached or inherited from a folder or organization.
- More than 85% of enterprises have user managed keys for
service accounts that are not rotated.
- More than 50% of enterprises have project-wide Secure
Shell (SSH) keys enabled for virtual machine (VM) instances.
VMware vSphere
- More than 95% of identities are using less than 5% of
permissions granted.
- More than 60% of groups and identities accessing the
vSphere infrastructure are inactive and have high-risk permissions.
- Highly over-provisioned "Destroy," "Remove" and "Reset"
functions for compute, storage and network across poorly defined
roles.
The full report details all of the key risk assessment
findings, the implications of each risk, recommendations for remediation and
recommendations for operationalizing permissions management, along with full
methodology.