Security Risks With Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has gained massive popularity in the last decade. It is being used in different industry sectors, and it has become essential to run a business. However, some people still worry about security risks in cloud computing. Well, nothing is perfect. Though cloud providers have been hard at work to minimize these risks as much as possible.

The hackers are always going to keep trying, and from time to time, they will succeed. According to Proofpoint, an enterprise security firm, in 2019, they detected around 15 million unauthorized login attempts for the US Fortune 500 firms. Unfortunately, 400,000 of these attempts were successful.

It should be considered that security breaches more usually happen due to human error rather than a flaw in the system. These human-errors can include weak passwords, phishing attempts, and flawed configuration of the cloud.

In 2010, Microsoft faced a security breach in its Business Productivity Online Suite due to a configuration issue. This led to unauthorized access to the employee’s contact information. Fortunately, the issue was fixed quickly and did not affect a lot of users.

Dropbox also faced a similar issue in 2012. Though they were not as lucky as Microsoft. Email addresses and passwords for over 68 million users were leaked and sold on the dark web. What was worse is that they only learned about the severity of this breach four years later.

Other companies have also faced security breaches in the cloud; however, most of them occurred in the first half of the decade. Since then, the companies have tried their best to tighten their security and prevent such incidents in the future.

Hacked Virtual Machines For Bitcoin Mining?

One of the greatest ways to earn money on cryptocurrencies is by mining coins , short: using computer processing power to gain coins and sell them anonymously. This is one reason hackers are trying to get people's cloud credentials and then to create hundreds of virtual machines that work for them and they can work for many hours before you’ll get any notification. This will generate tons of money for the hackers and you will get a huge bill for the computing power you’ve used on your account.

Ways to stay safe from sharing credentials

One of the ways hackers are getting in hands of your account credentials are through public versioning hosts such as Github. If you’re uploading your code together with your credentials, the chances are big that they’ll get scraped and used in the future by someone.s are made against peoples virtual machines to hijack peoples virtual machines to mine coins.