Dive Brief:

• Cloud services accounts with weak or non-existent credentials were the most common entry point for attackers in the second half of 2024, Google Cloud said Wednesday in its Threat Horizons Report.
• Attacks involving weak or no credentials accounted for nearly half of intrusions observed or studied by Google Threat Intelligence Group, Mandiant, Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO and other Google intelligence and security teams during the second half of last year. 
• Misconfigurations in cloud services were the second most common initial access vector, representing more than 1 in 3 attacks Google Cloud studied. The report noted a sharp increase in compromised application programming interfaces and user interfaces, which accounted for almost 1 in 5 attacks during the second half of the year.

Dive Insight:

Poor credential management is a chronic condition that puts enterprises and security professionals at a disadvantage in the fight against cybercrime and attacks linked to nation-state groups.

Credentials for customer accounts lacking multifactor authentication were at the root of a spree of attacks in April targeting more than 160 Snowflake customer environments. The attacks resulted in massive data breaches at AT&T, Advance Auto Parts, Pure Storage and other organizations.

Google Cloud’s research found a shift in the types of accounts attackers target, specifically overprivileged service accounts. “By exploiting these accounts, actors can more easily move laterally within an organization’s systems, potentially causing more damage from their intrusions,” the report said.

Attackers also have a preferred action they take after gaining initial access to victim environments. More than 3 in 5 attacker movements Google Cloud observed during the second half of 2024 involved lateral movement attempts.

These follow-on efforts by attackers underscore the swift and far-flung damage they can cause with cloud services left vulnerable to attack due to poor credential management.

“A single stolen credential can initiate a chain reaction, granting access to applications and data, both on-premises and in the cloud,” Google Cloud researchers said in the report. “This access can be further exploited to compromise infrastructure through remote-access services, manipulate MFA and establish a trusted presence for subsequent social engineering attacks.”