During the course of UpGuard’s cyber risk research, we uncover many assets that are publicly readable: cloud storage, file synchronization services, code repositories, and more. Most data exposures occur because of publicly readable assets, where sensitive and confidential data is leaked to the internet at large by way of a permissions misconfiguration.
Despite spending billions on cybersecurity solutions, private industry, government and enterprises alike are faced with the continued challenge of preventing data breaches. The reason cybersecurity solutions have not mitigated this problem is that the overwhelming majority of data exposure incidents are due to misconfigurations, typically by way of third-party vendors, not cutting-edge cyber attacks.
Nearly all large enterprises use the cloud to host servers, services, or data. Cloud hosted storage, like Amazon's S3, provides operational advantages over traditional computing that allow resources to be automatically distributed across robust and geographically varied servers. However, the cloud is part of the internet, and without proper care, the line separating the two disappears completely in cloud leaks— a major problem when it comes to sensitive information.
