UpGuard Blog

The way businesses handle the risks posed by their technology is changing. As with anything, adaptability is survivability. When the techniques, methods, and philosophies of the past aren’t working, the time has come to find something better to replace them. Cyber resilience is a set of practices and perspectives that mitigate risk within the processes and workflow of normal operations in order to protect organizations from their own technology and the people who would try to exploit it. This includes all forms of cyber attacks, but also applies to process errors inside the business that put data and assets in danger without outside help.

Technology and Information

How much digital technology is required for your business to operate? Unless this document has traveled back in time, the chances are quite a lot. Now consider how much digital technology your vendors require to operate. The scope of technology grows quickly when you consider how vast the interconnected ecosystem of digital business really is. But digital business isn’t just about technology, it’s about information. For many companies, the information they handle is just as critical as the systems that process it, if not more so.

The 10-second version is this: Cyber resilience is a fundamental change in understanding and accepting the true relationship between technology and risk. IT risk (or cyber risk, if you prefer) is actually business risk, and always has been. And the cybersecurity industry, for what it's worth, has generally avoided this concept because it goes against the narrative that their respective offerings—whether it's a firewall, IDS, monitoring tool, or otherwise—would be the one-size-fits-all silver bullet that can keep businesses safe.

When we examined the differences between breaches, attacks, hacks, and leaks, it wasn’t just an academic exercise. The way we think about this phenomenon affects the way we react to it. Put plainly: cloud leaks are an operational problem, not a security problem. Cloud leaks are not caused by external actors, but by operational gaps in the day-to-day work of the data handler. The processes by which companies create and maintain cloud storage must account for the risk of public exposure.

Introduction

Previously we introduced the concept of cloud leaks, and then examined how they happen. Now we’ll take a look at why they matter. To understand the consequences of cloud leaks for the organizations involved, we should first take a close look at exactly what it is that’s being leaked. Then we can examine some of the traditional ways information has been exploited, as well as some new and future threats such data exposures pose.

Making Copies

In our first article on cloud leaks, we took a look at what they were and why they should be classified separately from other cyber incidents. To understand how cloud leaks happen and why they are so common, we need to step back and first take a look at the way that leaked information is first generated, manipulated, and used. It’s almost taken as a foregone conclusion that these huge sets of sensitive data exist and that companies are doing something with them, but when you examine the practice of information handling, it becomes clear that organizing a resilient process becomes quite difficult at scale; operational gaps and process errors lead to vulnerable assets, which in turn lead to cloud leaks.

Breaches, Hacks, Leaks, Attacks

It seems like every day there’s a new incident of customer data exposure. Credit card and bank account numbers; medical records; personally identifiable information (PII) such as address, phone number, or SSN— just about every aspect of social interaction has an informational counterpart, and the social access this information provides to third parties gives many people the feeling that their privacy has been severely violated when it’s exposed.

One of the challenges of building and running information technology systems is solving novel problems. That's where frameworks like scrum and agile come in– getting from the unknown to the known with a minimum of frustration and waste. Another challenge is performing known tasks correctly every single time. Here runbooks, checklists, and documentation are your friend. And yet, despite a crowded market for IT process automation offerings, misconfigurations and missed patches are still a problem– and not just a problem, but the root cause of 75-99% of outages of breaches depending on platform.

Executable Documentation

Nearly all large enterprises use the cloud to host servers, services, or data. Cloud hosted storage, like Amazon's S3, provides operational advantages over traditional computing that allow resources to be automatically distributed across robust and geographically varied servers. However, the cloud is part of the internet, and without proper care, the line separating the two disappears completely— a major problem when it comes to sensitive information.

Given the complexity of modern information technology, assessing cyber risk can quickly become overwhelming. One of the most pragmatic guides comes from the Center for Internet Security (CIS). While CIS provides a comprehensive list of twenty controls, they also provide guidance on the critical steps that "eliminate the vast majority of your organisation's vulnerabilities." These controls are the foundation of any cyber resilience platform and at the center of UpGuard's capabilities.