Cloud accounts serve as the backbone of modern IT infrastructure. However, with this reliance comes vulnerability. Compromised accounts can lead to data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage. Despite advanced security measures, misconfigurations, insider threats, or sophisticated attacks can lead to compromised accounts. This case study delves into the causes of cloud account compromises, best practices to prevent such incidents, and recovery strategies tailored to AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts.

This blog outlines specific practices AccuKnox follows for AWS account management and how AccuKnox’s risk assessment accelerates recovery and enhances security posture. The principles discussed also include parallels for Azure and GCP.

Why Do Cloud Accounts Get Compromised?

Cloud account compromises are often a result of the following vulnerabilities:

1. Misconfigured Access Controls: Overly permissive IAM roles, lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA), or public exposure of sensitive resources.
2. Credential Theft: Phishing, social engineering, or malware that targets access tokens, API keys, or user credentials.
3. Insider Threats: Malicious actions or unintentional missteps by employees or contractors.
4. Insufficient Monitoring: Failure to detect anomalous activities in real-time due to lack of logging or alert mechanisms.
5. Unpatched Vulnerabilities: Exploitation of known flaws in cloud-native services or workloads.
6. Dependency Risks: Breaches of third-party tools or integrations, which can cascade into cloud account compromises.
7. Weak Governance: Lack of clearly defined policies for password management, resource provisioning, and offboarding processes.

Practices for the Use and Creation of AWS Accounts

Our approach to AWS account management is built on proven best practices that ensure robust security and governance. Below are the refined guidelines AccuKnox follows internally:

1. Root Account Ownership Ownership of the root account must reside with a single organization—the primary client (e.g., Aretedge client). This entity should own the account organization and be responsible for AWS billing. Centralized ownership reduces ambiguity and enhances accountability.
2. Avoidance of Root Account Tokens Access tokens must not be created at the root account or root organization level. This minimizes the risk of high-privilege credentials being leaked or exploited.
3. Limited Admin Accounts There should be no more than two admin accounts, and these should not belong to users from different organizations. Limiting admin privileges reduces the attack surface while ensuring clarity in access control.
4. Mandatory MFA Enablement MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) must be enabled for all root and non-root accounts. This adds an essential layer of protection against credential theft or brute-force attacks.
5. Password Reset Policy A password reset rule should be enforced across all accounts, with a 60-day cycle being an effective standard. Regular resets help mitigate risks from stolen credentials.
6. Organizational Email Enforcement Access to AWS accounts should be tied strictly to organizational email addresses. This ensures that if an employee leaves, their access is automatically revoked when their email is deactivated.
7. Daily Budget Constraints Set daily budget constraints for all accounts, including production and QA environments. Automated daily emails should be sent to relevant stakeholders. This not only prevents overspending but also flags potential security breaches involving unauthorized resource creation.
8. Least Permissive Access Dependent organizations must be granted only the minimum necessary permissions. This adheres to the principle of least privilege, reducing risk from accidental or intentional misuse.
9. Production Account Isolation Production accounts must be isolated from development and QA accounts. Access to production should be restricted to a select few, and an audit trail should always be enabled to monitor activities.
10. Secure Credential Exchange Organization-wide policies should mandate the use of secure services like pwpush for exchanging credentials. Clear text communication via email, Slack, or other chats should be strictly prohibited.
11. Credential Storage Common credentials should be securely stored in a secrets management system such as Vault or NordPass. This ensures centralized control and minimizes accidental leaks.
12. CI/CD Secret Management Secrets for CI/CD pipelines should be created at the GitHub organization level and accessed at individual repositories. Avoid managing secrets on a per-repo basis as it introduces maintenance challenges and security gaps.
13. Monthly Reviews Conduct monthly reviews focusing on:
    • Cost and security compliance for the above settings.
    • Access granted to third-party organizations.

These practices lay the groundwork for a secure and manageable AWS environment. AccuKnox’s risk assessment service extends this foundation by identifying specific asset-level risks and providing actionable insights for remediation.

If you want to get started, begin by referring to AWS Account Onboarding on AccuKnox .
If you wish to try out AccuKnox via the AWS Marketplace check out the AWS Installation Playbook.

CNAPP Risk Assessment and Findings

AccuKnox’s risk assessment offers organizations an efficient way to ensure cloud security compliance. Through an automated and systematic process, our CNAPP platform scans your cloud assets, identifies risks, and provides actionable recommendations. Below is a high-level overview of how it works:

1. Asset Discovery: We identify all cloud assets, including compute instances, storage buckets, IAM roles, and more.
2. Baseline Configuration Check: Current configurations are compared against security best practices and compliance standards.
3. Risk Identification: The system flags critical issues such as public exposure, misconfigured permissions, or unencrypted resources.
4. Automated Ticket Creation: For any critical issues, tickets are automatically generated with detailed remediation steps.
5. Continuous Monitoring: Get ongoing insights into compliance drift and highlights new risks as they emerge.

Organizations using this service typically remediate all identified issues within two to three weeks, significantly enhancing their security posture while ensuring operational continuity. AWS’s CI/CD ecosystem includes AWS CodeBuild, Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CodeDeploy. AccuKnox enhances this by embedding container scanning and security tools into pipelines. AccuKnox’s integration streamlines security for container images, applications, and infrastructure without disrupting development. Key points include:

1. Container Image Scanning: Detects and blocks vulnerable images before they reach the registry. Help Docs.
2. Inline Scanning for Privacy: Sensitive image data stays in your pipeline; only analysis reports are sent to the backend.
3. Vulnerability Management: Use the CNAPP SaaS dashboard to identify and fix CRITICAL/HIGH vulnerabilities, then rescan to verify fixes.
4. Multi-Tool Integration: Compatible with Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and GCP Pipeline for consistent security.
5. Enhanced Security:
   • DAST: Identify runtime application vulnerabilities. Help Docs.
   • SAST: Detect and fix code issues pre-deployment. Help Docs.
6. IaC Scanning: Trigger scans for AWS IaC files to identify misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Help Docs.

Dashboard Walkthrough

After the IaC scan is completed to see the findings users need to navigate to the Issues-> Findings section and select IaC findings in the filter to see all the findings. You can also check all other sorts of findings including SAST, DAST, Container Scan, Cloud Findings and so on.

We can filter the findings based on the Repository, Risk Factor, and so on.

Remediation – How to fix problems and create tickets?

To remediate any findings users will need to select the finding or group of findings From the issues-> Findings page and click Create Ticket as shown in the below screenshot.

Before this users must have integrated their Ticketing backend like Jira Servicenow or connects or Freshservice under Integrations->CSPM section

After clicking on the create ticket Icon the next page will popup

Once the user clicks on Create Ticket new page with all the information related to the IaC findings and with a predefined Priority based on the Risk Factor. The user has to click on Create to confirm the ticket creation.

Azure-Specific Practices and Recovery

Prevention

1. Account Governance: Leverage Azure Active Directory (AAD) for centralized identity and access management.
2. MFA Enforcement: Use Conditional Access Policies to enforce MFA across all user roles.
3. Azure Security Center: Regularly review security recommendations and implement advanced threat detection.
4. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Assign minimal permissions through granular RBAC policies.
5. Key Vault Usage: Store sensitive keys, certificates, and secrets in Azure Key Vault.

Recovery

1. Immediate Lockdown: Use Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) to disable compromised accounts or roles.
2. Threat Analysis: Run Azure Sentinel to detect malicious activity and pinpoint breach sources.
3. Credential Rotation: Revoke compromised keys and secrets from Azure Key Vault.
4. Resource Audit: Evaluate the integrity of VMs, databases, and storage accounts for tampering.

GCP-Specific Practices and Recovery

Prevention

1. Identity and Access Management: Use Google Cloud IAM with predefined roles to minimize privilege escalation risks.
2. Service Accounts Security: Avoid hardcoding service account keys; instead, use workload identity federation.
3. Audit Logging: Enable Cloud Audit Logs for all resources, ensuring full traceability.
4. Encryption: Enforce encryption at rest and in transit for all data.

Recovery

1. Account Freeze: Suspend compromised service accounts or users immediately.
2. Analyze Logs: Use Cloud Logging and Google Chronicle for forensic analysis.
3. Credential Revocation: Rotate OAuth tokens, SSH keys, and other sensitive credentials.
4. Restore Resources: Use snapshots and backups to restore affected resources to a clean state.

Takeaways

Both prior planning and reactive effectiveness are necessary for recovering a compromised cloud account. Continuous monitoring, strong access controls, and quick incident response are key components of AccuKnox’s all-inclusive security framework for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Organizations can reduce risks and guarantee a speedy recovery in the case of a compromise by putting these best practices into effect. Although AWS is the main emphasis of these guidelines, the concepts also apply to Azure and GCP, which are customized for their individual ecosystems. 

You can protect your workloads in minutes using AccuKnox, it is available to protect your Kubernetes and other cloud workloads using Kernel Native Primitives such as AppArmor, SELinux, and eBPF.

Let us know if you are seeking additional guidance in planning your cloud security program.