Cloud Security Posture
Cloud Security Posture represents the overall cybersecurity strength and readiness of an organization’s cloud environment. It encompasses the collective status of policies, automated controls, compliance levels, and vulnerability management across infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) deployments.
A strong cloud security posture means an organization has full visibility into its cloud assets, has configured them correctly, and can detect and respond to threats in real time. Conversely, a weak posture is often characterized by misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and limited visibility, leaving the environment vulnerable to breaches.
Key Components of Cloud Security Posture
To maintain a resilient defense, security teams focus on several core pillars that define their cloud environment posture.
Visibility and Asset Management: You cannot secure what you cannot see. A strong posture requires a complete inventory of all cloud resources, including virtual machines, storage buckets, databases, and containers.
Identity and Access Management (IAM): This involves ensuring that the principle of least privilege is applied. Only authorized users and systems should have access to specific resources, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) must be enforced.
Configuration Management: Misconfigurations are the leading cause of cloud breaches. A robust posture ensures that default settings are hardened, open ports are closed, and encryption is enabled for data at rest and in transit.
Compliance and Governance: Organizations must ensure their cloud environments comply with industry standards and regulations, including GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and PCI DSS.
Threat Detection: The ability to identify anomalies, such as unauthorized API calls or suspicious network traffic, is essential for maintaining a secure posture.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
To achieve and maintain a secure posture, organizations use specific tools and strategies known as Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). CSPM solutions automate the identification and remediation of risks across cloud infrastructures.
Primary Functions of CSPM:
Continuous Monitoring: CSPM tools constantly scan the cloud environment to detect changes that drift from the established security baseline.
Automated Remediation: When a misconfiguration is detected, such as an unencrypted storage bucket, CSPM can automatically fix the issue without human intervention.
Risk Assessment: These tools score the environment based on known vulnerabilities and prioritize issues that pose an immediate threat.
Multi-Cloud Support: As organizations use multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), CSPM provides a unified view of security across all platforms.
Common Risks to Cloud Security Posture
Several factors can degrade an organization's security standing in the cloud:
Shadow IT: Employees using unauthorized cloud applications create blind spots that security teams cannot manage or secure.
Permission Sprawl: Over time, users often accumulate more access rights than they need, creating a larger attack surface if credentials are compromised.
Lack of Encryption: Failing to encrypt sensitive data leaves it readable to anyone who gains unauthorized access to the storage medium.
Publicly Exposed Assets: Storage buckets or databases inadvertently left open to the public internet are easy targets for attackers.
Frequently Asked Questions about Cloud Security Posture
What is the difference between Cloud Security Posture and Cloud Security Posture Management? Cloud Security Posture is the state or status of your security (how secure you are). Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is the process and technology used to achieve and maintain that secure state.
Why is Cloud Security Posture important? It is critical because cloud environments are dynamic. Resources are spun up and down automatically, and without a defined posture and monitoring strategy, vulnerabilities can be introduced and exploited in minutes.
How often should Cloud Security Posture be assessed? It should be assessed continuously. Because cloud environments change frequently, a one-time audit is insufficient. Automated tools are required to monitor the posture in real time.
Does a strong Cloud Security Posture prevent all attacks? No security measure can prevent all attacks. However, a strong posture significantly reduces the attack surface, makes it much harder for attackers to succeed, and ensures that if a breach occurs, the organization can detect and contain it quickly.
Improving Cloud Security Posture with ThreatNG
ThreatNG enhances Cloud Security Posture by validating the effectiveness of internal cloud controls from an external, adversarial perspective. While internal tools manage configurations, ThreatNG verifies what is actually exposed to the public internet, ensuring that cloud assets, permissions, and trusted relationships are not vulnerable to exploitation.
External Discovery of Cloud Assets
A robust cloud security posture begins with knowing exactly what is exposed. ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to map an organization's entire digital footprint across multiple cloud providers without installing agents or using connectors.
Shadow Cloud Identification: ThreatNG identifies "Shadow IT" where employees may have spun up unauthorized cloud instances, storage buckets, or databases (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) that bypass corporate security policies.
Service Enumeration: It detects specific cloud services in use, such as AWS S3 buckets, Microsoft Azure instances, and Google Cloud Platform resources, providing a clear inventory of external-facing assets that need to be secured.
External Assessment of Cloud Vulnerabilities
Once assets are identified, ThreatNG performs deep assessments to determine their susceptibility to specific cloud-based attacks.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility This is a critical assessment for cloud security. If an organization deletes a cloud resource (like an Azure Web App or AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment) but forgets to remove the DNS record pointing to it, an attacker can register that resource and take over the subdomain.
Cloud & Infrastructure Analysis: ThreatNG cross-references external hostnames against a comprehensive vendor list. It checks for "dangling" DNS records that point to storage providers such as AWS S3, Amazon CloudFront, or Microsoft Azure.
PaaS & Serverless Checks: The solution targets platform-as-a-service providers, identifying vulnerabilities in services such as Heroku, Vercel, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
CDN & Proxy Verification: It also assesses Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Fastly and Ngrok to ensure no abandoned endpoints are claimed by malicious actors.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility ThreatNG assigns a security rating (A-F) based on the presence of critical security headers that protect cloud-hosted applications.
Header Analysis: It scans subdomains for missing headers, such as
Content-Security-Policy(CSP),HTTP Strict-Transport-Security(HSTS), andX-Frame-Options.Prevention of Client-Side Attacks: By ensuring these headers are present, ThreatNG helps prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and clickjacking attacks that could compromise cloud administrative sessions.
Investigation Modules for Deep Context
ThreatNG’s investigation modules provide granular details that help security teams understand the specific risks affecting their cloud posture.
Cloud & Infrastructure Module: This module goes beyond simple discovery to categorize and analyze the technologies that power the external attack surface. It breaks down findings into categories such as Storage, PaaS, and DevOps, helping teams determine whether their "dev" or "staging" environments are accidentally exposed.
Code Repository Exposure Module: Cloud security often fails when secrets are leaked. This module scans public repositories for accidental commits that contain API keys, cloud access tokens, or sensitive configuration files. If a developer accidentally pushes an AWS Access Key to a public repo, ThreatNG flags it before an attacker can use it to compromise the cloud environment.
Domain Intelligence Module: This module facilitates analysis of deprecated headers and subdomain intelligence, links external assets to their cloud hosting providers, and identifies potential weaknesses in DNS configuration.
Intelligence Repositories and Dark Web Monitoring
To protect cloud environments, organizations must know whether their administrative credentials have been compromised.
Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): ThreatNG monitors the dark web for leaked credentials associated with the organization’s domain. If a cloud administrator's email and password are exposed in a breach, ThreatNG immediately alerts the team to prevent unauthorized access to the cloud console.
Ransomware and Leaked Documents: The solution indexes archived files and ransomware sites to detect whether sensitive business documents or cloud architecture diagrams have been leaked, which could help attackers plan a targeted attack on the cloud infrastructure.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
Cloud environments change instantly; therefore, security posture must be monitored continuously.
Risk-Prioritized Reporting: ThreatNG delivers reports that categorize findings by severity (High, Medium, Low), enabling teams to prioritize fixing critical issues, such as a Subdomain Takeover vulnerability, before addressing minor header misconfigurations.
News and Threat Context: Through its Reconnaissance Hub, ThreatNG provides context on the latest cloud-targeting campaigns, helping teams understand why a specific vulnerability matters in the current threat landscape.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG acts as a force multiplier when paired with internal security tools, creating a unified defense strategy.
ThreatNG and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) ThreatNG provides the "attacker's view" to validate the findings of CSPM tools.
How they work together: While a CSPM tool monitors internal configurations (e.g., "Is this S3 bucket set to private?"), ThreatNG validates the reality from the outside (e.g., "Can I actually access this S3 bucket from the public internet?"). This confirms whether internal policies are effectively blocking external access.
ThreatNG and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) ThreatNG feeds external threat intelligence into the SIEM to enhance threat detection.
How they work together: ThreatNG sends alerts about Subdomain Takeovers or Compromised Credentials to the SIEM. The SIEM can then correlate this data with internal logs to determine whether the compromised credentials have been used to attempt a login to the cloud management console.
ThreatNG and Identity and Access Management (IAM) ThreatNG strengthens access controls by identifying compromised identities.
How they work together: When ThreatNG discovers a leaked credential for a cloud user, it signals the IAM solution to force a password reset or revoke a session token, instantly closing the door on a potential breach.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does ThreatNG discover cloud assets without agents? ThreatNG uses purely external unauthenticated discovery methods, similar to how an attacker would scan the internet. It analyzes DNS records, certificates, and web content to identify services and link them back to the organization.
Can ThreatNG help prevent cloud account takeovers? Yes. By monitoring for Compromised Credentials and Code Repository Exposure, ThreatNG identifies the leaked passwords and API keys that attackers use to take over cloud accounts.
What is the difference between ThreatNG and a traditional CSPM? CSPM tools scan the cloud environment (via API connectors) to verify configurations. ThreatNG looks from the outside (the internet) to see what is actually exposed and exploitable. They are complementary solutions.
