Securing Dynamic Cloud Environments: Best Practices for Comprehensive Scanning

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native development, the complexity of securing dynamic environments continues to grow. Vulnerability scanning remains a cornerstone of cloud security, enabling organizations to identify and address risks effectively. However, with the increasing prevalence of exploited vulnerabilities, persistent cloud misconfigurations, and exposure to identity leaks, traditional approaches to vulnerability scanning are no longer sufficient.

This blog delves into key focus areas to ensure a robust cloud security posture.

Exploited Vulnerabilities Are Increasing, and One Method of Scanning Is Not Enough

In 2024, the frequency and impact of exploited vulnerabilities reached unprecedented levels. According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), over 32% of breaches were attributed to vulnerability exploitation, underscoring the need for proactive scanning strategies. Attackers leverage unpatched systems, zero-day vulnerabilities, and configuration gaps to compromise cloud environments.

A notable example involved cybercriminal gangs exploiting vulnerabilities in public websites to steal Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials and other sensitive data from thousands of accounts. This incident highlights the importance of securing cloud environments against unauthorized access and ensuring regular credential audits to prevent such breaches.

Additionally, a study revealed a vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Application Load Balancer (ALB) that could allow attackers to bypass access controls and access web applications. The issue, tied to user implementation rather than a software bug, demonstrated how attackers could manipulate ALB authentication handoff to a third-party service, accessing sensitive application data. These cases underscore the critical need for thorough scanning of authentication configurations and regular security reviews.

To address this evolving threat landscape, organizations must adopt a hybrid scanning approach:

• Agent-Based Scanning: Continuous monitoring of live workloads offers granular, real-time insights into vulnerabilities, including runtime misconfigurations and zero-day threats. By operating directly within workloads, agents provide unmatched depth in vulnerability detection.
• Agentless Scanning: Broad, non-intrusive scans excel at identifying infrastructure misconfigurations and exposure risks across storage, networking, and IAM policies. These scans are particularly effective for environments where agent deployment is challenging, such as
  ephemeral workloads that are alive for a short period of time.

Why Both Are Necessary: A single method cannot fully address the complexities of modern cloud infrastructures. Organizations achieve comprehensive coverage by integrating agent-based and agentless scanning, balancing performance with thorough detection. This way, you ensure you scan and secure most of your cloud workloads, including ephemeral or long-running.

Pro Tips: Automate scan schedules, prioritize findings based on exploitability, and integrate results into incident response workflows. Conduct regular workshops to train teams on interpreting scan results and implementing rapid remediation.

You should start with agentless scans based on cloud events, as you do not know if any cloud workload, when deployed, is available for a short or long duration. Once you get first-time visibility and assessments done, you extend those workloads to agent-based scanning to ensure you get comprehensive scans.

Actionable Steps to Detect Vulnerabilities

Call to Action: Ensure your security strategy includes agent-based and agentless scanning to cover diverse vulnerabilities comprehensively. For security teams, establish the following actionable steps:

1. Conduct a Capability Assessment: Evaluate the performance of scanning tools and techniques against live and infrastructure-based vulnerabilities to identify current gaps.
2. Set Up Regular Training: Educate your teams on interpreting scan results and applying prioritized remediations effectively.
3. Automate Workflows: Integrate scanning results into incident response systems to enable rapid containment and resolution.
4. Perform Baseline Reviews: Schedule quarterly reviews to reassess cloud environments for new risks and refine the scanning strategy based on threat trends.

Security teams can maintain a proactive stance against evolving vulnerabilities by operationalizing these steps while optimizing cloud performance.

Critical Misconfigurations in the Cloud: The Persistent Challenge

Cloud misconfigurations remain a leading cause of breaches, accounting for over 18% of incidents in 2024, as reported by the DBIR. Errors such as open storage buckets, overly permissive IAM roles, and weak firewall rules expose critical data and resources to attackers.

To combat this, organizations must implement proactive measures that detect and prevent misconfigurations early in the development lifecycle. Key strategies include:

• Continuous Monitoring for Configuration Drift: Dynamic cloud environments experience frequent changes that can inadvertently introduce vulnerabilities. Automated tools can detect and alert teams to deviations from secure baselines, ensuring consistent security practices.
• Shift-Left Security with Infrastructure as Code (IaC): IaC templates ensure that configurations align with security standards from the outset, reducing human error and simplifying compliance.
• Real-Time Alerts and Automation: High-risk changes, such as modifying IAM policies or disabling encryption, should trigger immediate alerts and automated remediation workflows to minimize exposure.

Key Focus Areas:

• Storage Buckets (e.g., S3): Regularly verify encryption settings, public access configurations, and lifecycle policies to mitigate risks associated with data exposure.
• Metadata Services: Deprecated configurations, such as AWS’s IMDSv1, should be identified and replaced with secure alternatives, such as IMDSv2.
• Encryption: Ensure data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with keys managed securely to prevent unauthorized access.

Pro Tips: Leverage IaC scanning tools to catch misconfigurations before deployment. Establish policies for mandatory encryption and least-privilege access. Regularly audit logs to detect anomalous changes to critical resources.

Actionable Steps to Find Misconfigurations

Call to Action: Strengthen your cloud configuration management with the following actionable steps:

1. Integrate Automated Configuration Scans: Deploy tools that enforce secure baselines by scanning configurations in real time. Ensure these scans are integrated into CI/CD pipelines for early detection.
2. Establish Governance Policies: Implement policies for mandatory encryption, access control, and logging practices to standardize security configurations.
3. Perform Regular Configuration Audits: Schedule quarterly audits of cloud environments to identify and remediate vulnerabilities arising from configuration drift or oversights.
4. Simulate Configuration-Driven Incidents: Conduct drills to test the team’s ability to detect and respond to misconfiguration-induced breaches. Use these learnings to refine monitoring tools and response protocols.

By operationalizing these measures, security teams can avoid misconfigurations and reduce the attack surface across cloud infrastructures.

Exposure Is Increasing Due to Identity Leakages and Unwanted Entitlements

Identity-related vulnerabilities—such as leaked credentials and excessive permissions—are among the most exploited attack vectors. In 2024, 62% of breaches analyzed in the DBIR involved compromised credentials, often due to misconfigured IAM policies, excessive entitlements, or leaked keys.

Attackers exploit these gaps to move laterally within cloud environments, accessing sensitive data and escalating privileges. Addressing these risks requires a proactive and continuous approach:

• Entitlement Reviews: Conduct regular audits of IAM policies, roles, and permissions to ensure adherence to the principle of least privilege (PoLP). Revoke unused access keys and eliminate overly permissive roles.
• Detecting Lateral Movement Risks: Identify and mitigate configurations that allow attackers to navigate across systems, such as overly broad IAM policies or unmonitored access credentials.
• Proactive Monitoring for Identity Exposures: Use advanced scanning tools to detect publicly exposed credentials, weak passwords, and other identity-related vulnerabilities.

Indicators of Compromise (IOCs):

• Suspicious traffic patterns indicate potential credential abuse.
• Public-facing resources with unencrypted sensitive data.
• Unused or abandoned subdomains that could be targeted for takeover.

Pro Tips: Implement conditional access policies and enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all privileged accounts. Use role-based access control (RBAC) to limit permissions and monitor logs for unusual access patterns regularly.

Actionable Steps to Find and Close Identity-Related Vulnerabilities

Call to Action: Take the following steps to address the risk of identity leakages and unwanted entitlements:

1. Strengthen your identity and access management strategy. 
2. Schedule regular entitlement reviews and leverage tools that provide real-time visibility into IAM configurations. 
3. Educate your teams on best practices for credential security and conduct regular penetration tests to uncover identity-related vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

The modern cloud infrastructure landscape demands more than traditional security approaches. The attack surface has expanded exponentially with organizations leveraging multiple cloud services, containerized workloads, serverless functions, and microservices architectures. Our security strategies must evolve accordingly.

Begin by auditing your cloud infrastructure’s current security posture. Implement automated scanning across your cloud services, storage configurations, and identity frameworks. Integrate security checks into your infrastructure-as-code practices and establish clear metrics for measuring your security improvements. The cloud offers unprecedented scalability and flexibility – ensure your security measures are equally dynamic and robust to protect these powerful capabilities.

Explore Qualys TotalCloud and see how it can help you take your scanning practices to the next level—in the cloud.