Cloud Misconfiguration
What is Cloud Misconfiguration?
Cloud MisconfigurationA security gap caused by incorrect or insecure settings of cloud services, such as exposed storage, weak IAM policies, or open management ports.
Cloud misconfiguration is the leading root cause of cloud data breaches: it happens when an administrator, an Infrastructure-as-Code template, or a CI/CD pipeline configures a service in a way that violates security best practices. Typical examples include publicly readable object storage, security groups open to 0.0.0.0/0, missing encryption, disabled logging, default credentials, or overly broad IAM trust policies. Because cloud APIs make it trivial to roll out resources at scale, a single bad template can replicate the same flaw across hundreds of accounts and regions. Detection and prevention rely on CSPM, IaC scanning, policy-as-code (OPA, AWS Config, Azure Policy), and continuous compliance checks tied to ticketing and remediation workflows.
● Examples
- 01
An S3 bucket left public, exposing customer PII.
- 02
A security group allowing SSH from the Internet to all EC2 instances.
● Frequently asked questions
What is Cloud Misconfiguration?
A security gap caused by incorrect or insecure settings of cloud services, such as exposed storage, weak IAM policies, or open management ports. It belongs to the Cloud Security category of cybersecurity.
What does Cloud Misconfiguration mean?
A security gap caused by incorrect or insecure settings of cloud services, such as exposed storage, weak IAM policies, or open management ports.
How do you defend against Cloud Misconfiguration?
Defences for Cloud Misconfiguration typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.
What are other names for Cloud Misconfiguration?
Common alternative names include: Cloud security misconfiguration.