With the growing reliance on cloud infrastructure, organizations must be vigilant against potential extortion threats targeting misconfigurations and weak access controls. Unfortunately, extortion threats are a huge problem. According to the Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), "Roughly one-third of all breaches involved Ransomware or some other Extortion technique." Hypothetically, an attack could leverage exposed files and credentials to infiltrate cloud environments, escalate privileges, and potentially exfiltrate sensitive data.
This blog will walk through how such an attack might occur, outline the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques relevant to this scenario, and highlight critical best practices for securing cloud environments.