Companies are doing better at protecting their cloud infrastructure, but holes still remain, with 80.7% of companies having at least one neglected, Internet-facing workload, according to a study published by cloud security firm Orca Security on July 28.
The majority of firms (58%) have a cloud server or asset running an end-of-life operating system or other software — such as Ubuntu 14.04 or Debian 8 — while 49% have a web server that has not been patched in six months. In addition, nearly a quarter of organizations have an administrator or root cloud account that does not have multifactor authentication enabled, according to the "2020 State of Public Cloud Security Risks" report.
Overall, businesses are working to lock down their public-facing cloud assets, but attackers only need to find one way in, says Avi Shua, CEO of Orca Security.
"This really comes down to coverage," he says. "You can be keeping up-to-date on 98% or 99% of the organization, but if you miss 1% or 2%, especially the ones that are facing the Internet, you are open to compromise. This is one of the unfair parts of security."
The report uses data from about 2 million scans of 300,000 public-cloud assets of companies that have tested the company's security service. Because such businesses are already focused on security, the results are likely a best case scenario, says Shua.
While a sprinkling of vulnerable servers, services, or other assets may not seem like a serious threat, the problem is that once inside a company's virtual infrastructure, security is much lower, Orca Secu ..
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