The cloud attack surface refers to all the potentially exposed applications, networked devices and infrastructure components that threat actors could exploit within a cloud infrastructure or environment. Issues such as unpatched vulnerabilities in microservices architecture and misconfigurations can compromise the security of cloud-based systems, applications and data. The attack surface in a cloud environment is dynamic and can change as the cloud infrastructure evolves and new services, applications and configurations are introduced.
Common components of the cloud attack surface include:
User accounts and credentials Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) Cloud databases or object storage Network connections, including virtual private clouds (VPCs) and public internet connections Virtual machines (VMs) and containers (Kubernetes) Data in transit (sent over a network) Data at rest (in cloud storage)