A Sonrai Security report on 25 large enterprises with over 10,000 cloud accounts revealed that 61% of associated identities are unused, according to Security Boulevard.
Of these, 88% belong to zombie machines and 12% to human identities. The study also found that 92% of identities with access to sensitive permissions were inactive for over 90 days. Each organization manages an average of 11,290 identities, with 81% being machine identities and 19% human.
Sonrai Security CEO Brendan Hannigan highlighted the ongoing issue of organizations not tracking cloud resource access, leading to increased risks of credential theft and unauthorized access. He attributed much of this security laxity to convenience, with developers often granted excessive privileges that are rarely revoked.
Hannigan stressed that most cloud security incidents could be mitigated through regular audits of access permissions and a better understanding of shared security responsibilities with cloud providers. Misconfigurations due to unsupervised infrastructure provisioning by developers further exacerbate the problem, making it easier for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities.
