Cloud attack
Cloud attack
(also Living Off the Land Binary)
Cloud attack definition
A cloud attack is a malicious activity that targets systems, services, infrastructure, or data hosted in a cloud. These attacks aim to compromise cloud resources’ integrity, availability, or confidentiality. Cloud attacks include data breaches, data loss, account or service traffic hijacking, insecure interfaces, denial of service (DoS), and more.
Dangers of cloud attacks
- Data theft or loss. A cloud attack can result in the theft of sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, confidential business plans, and other proprietary data. This can result in financial loss, and identity theft.
- Service disruption. Denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks can overwhelm a service with traffic, causing it to become unavailable to legitimate users.
- Compliance violations. If an organization is subject to regulations regarding data security (such as HIPAA in healthcare or GDPR in the EU), a cloud attack that results in data loss or unauthorized access could lead to regulatory fines or penalties.
- Reputation damage. Customers and partners may lose trust in the organization’s ability to protect its data and might take their business elsewhere.
- Costs related to recovery. Recovering from a cloud attack may involve forensic investigations, strengthening security measures, or implementing more secure technology.