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The average cost of a data breach decreased to 4.44 million USD in 2025, a 9% decline from its 2024 peak. Yet this global improvement masks a troubling regional divide. In the U.S., average costs reached $10.22 million, the highest globally, due to increased regulatory penalties and higher expenses for detection and containment.
Despite record spending on cloud security, high-profile breaches continue to be alarmingly common. In the APAC region, 15% of organizations reported a cloud breach in the past year, mirroring the global rate of 14%.
This growing concern has reshaped corporate priorities. Cloud security ranks as the top area of investment, with one in three security dollars spent protecting cloud environments. Yet despite the proliferation of advanced tools and heavy spending, security teams are still being outmaneuvered by adversaries.
The path to true cloud resilience is not achieved through additional tools that create disjointed systems, which lead to further blind spots that can be exploited by “cloud-conscious” attackers. Leaders must bridge the operational and cultural gaps between DevOps and SecOps, where the most significant vulnerabilities often arise. That is where modern cloud attacks are won and lost, and this article provides deeper insights into the issue.
A New Breed of Attacker Has Emerged
Today’s adversaries are no longer just opportunistically scanning for open ports. They are methodical, knowledgeable, and operate with a deep understanding of cloud architecture. These threat actors conduct “interactive intrusions,” using hands-on keyboard techniques to navigate complex cloud environments, making them difficult to distinguish from legitimate administrators.
The cloud is central to modern business, powering revenue-generating apps and housing sensitive customer data. For highly organized eCrime groups, compromising a single cloud control plane offers a far greater return on investment than attacking a thousand scattered endpoints. In 2023, 84% of all adversary-led cloud intrusions were motivated by eCrime.
And they weren’t smash-and-grab operations. Adversaries like SCATTERED SPIDER demonstrate a refined tradecraft, abusing cloud services and exploiting identity misconfigurations to achieve their objectives. They understand that the real reward is control over the entire infrastructure, not just a server.
In the cloud, identity is the new perimeter. The fight for control over the enterprise is now waged over access keys, roles, and permissions within Identity and Access Management systems. While security teams invest resources in network firewalls, attackers often find ways to bypass them by using compromised credentials.
This strategic shift has three critical implications:
Misconfigurations Are the New Exploits: A minor misconfiguration in Identity and Access Management, such as granting excessive access to a service account, can give an attacker the keys to the kingdom. These errors are far more common and harder to detect than traditional software vulnerabilities.
Credential Theft Is Paramount: Attackers are relentlessly focused on acquiring legitimate credentials through phishing, social engineering, or by purchasing them on the dark web. A valid set of credentials makes an attacker indistinguishable from an authorized user, bypassing layers of conventional security.
Lateral Movement Is Frictionless: Once inside, attackers exploit complex identity relationships and trust policies to move between cloud services. They leverage their initial foothold to escalate privileges, ultimately gaining access to critical data and systems without triggering traditional network alerts.
The DevSecOps Disconnect: A Strategic Vulnerability
The single greatest risk to the modern cloud environment is the cultural and operational gap between development and security teams. The relentless pressure to innovate and deploy code quickly often pushes security to the back of the line. This friction creates a landscape ripe for exploitation.
The “move fast and break things” ethos of agile development, when not balanced with integrated security, becomes a strategic vulnerability. Developers, focused on functionality and speed, can inadvertently introduce significant risks. This includes deploying Infrastructure as Code templates with critical misconfigurations or using open-source libraries with known vulnerabilities.
The rise of shadow cloud environments exacerbates the problem. Developers are creating unauthorized accounts to test ideas or expedite projects. This creates infrastructure that the security team cannot see. These rogue environments lack rules, monitoring, and security, acting as unprotected backdoors into the corporate network. As a result, the security team must constantly try to keep up in a rapidly changing environment.
Transforming Cloud Security into a Strategic Advantage
For B2B leaders, the evolving threat landscape demands more than reactive defenses. Organizations must shift from a tool-centric approach to a strategy-driven model that integrates security across the business.
Key steps for B2B organizations include:
Strengthen identity governance: Enforce least-privilege access, monitor privileged accounts, and require multi-factor authentication for critical users.
Close the DevSecOps gap: Integrate security into development pipelines, ensure IaC templates and container images are scanned, and provide developers with real-time feedback on vulnerabilities.
Gain unified visibility: Map cloud assets, identities, and access paths to eliminate blind spots that attackers can exploit.
Prioritize strategic risks: Focus on vulnerabilities with the highest impact. For example. Look for combinations of exposed data, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions. This approach is better than chasing every minor threat, as it would build a stronger dam instead of plugging small holes.
By focusing on identity, B2B organizations can secure the keys to their cloud environment. Bridging the DevSecOps gap and unifying visibility helps eliminate blind spots that attackers exploit. Prioritizing high-impact risks turns cloud security from a reactive task into a strategic advantage, enabling safe and scalable growth.
Winning in the New Cloud Reality
The threat landscape has fundamentally changed, and it will continue to evolve, just like every other technological asset, thanks to AI. Adversaries no longer focus solely on network perimeters — they manipulate the very fabric of the cloud. From exploiting identity, misconfigurations to pinpointing and squeezing through the gaps between development and security teams. Human and machine identities, combined with shadow cloud environments, have become prime vectors for attack.
True cloud resilience requires more than advanced tools. Organizations must adopt a strategy-driven approach that unifies visibility, strengthens identity management, and integrates security into the development lifecycle. By closing operational and cultural gaps, and treating cloud security as a dynamic, holistic discipline, enterprises can stay ahead of sophisticated, “cloud-conscious” attackers and protect their most critical assets.
