Cloud attacks are a type of cyberattack that specifically targets services, systems, data, or infrastructure hosted in a cloud. The attacker intends to compromise the cloud’s resources’ integrity, confidentiality, or availability.
These attacks often involve data loss, data breaches, denial of service(DoS), insecure interfaces, service or account traffic hijacking, etc.
Potential risks of cloud attacks
- Data theft or loss: Cloud attacks can ultimately lead to losing vital data, including social security numbers, credit card details, proprietary data, and confidential business plans. The attacker can then use this stolen data to perpetuate impersonation resulting in financial loss for the target.
- Service disruption: The attacker can initiate denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks intended to overwhelm a service with traffic, making it inaccessible to other users.
- Compliance violations: A cloud attack could trigger compliance violations by an organization, especially if it is subject to data security regulations like HIPAA in healthcare or GDPR in the EU. The attack is considered a compliance violation if the cloud attack results in unauthorised access or data loss — the organisation could also be charged with fines.
- Reputation damage: An attack, especially one that results in the loss of sensitive data, can negatively affect trust in the corporation’s capacity to keep client data safe and result in a loss of business for the corporation.
- Data recovery cost: The time, effort, and financial cost required to recover the lost data can take a toll. The process can involve strengthening security measures, forensic investigations, and possibly implementing more secure technology.
