The Rise of Cloud-Native and Identity-Enabled Attacks: A Strategic Wake-Up Call for Cloud Architects

The Rise of Cloud-Native and Identity-Enabled Attacks: A Strategic Wake-Up Call for Cloud Architects

Introduction: A Paradigm Shift in the Cloud Threat Landscape

As organisations migrate critical workloads to the cloud in pursuit of agility and scalability, cyber threats are evolving just as rapidly. The traditional perimeter-based approach to security is fast becoming obsolete in a world dominated by cloud-native architectures and distributed applications. Today, attackers are not merely breaking in; they are logging in—with valid credentials.

Compromised identities have emerged as the new currency of cybercrime in the cloud, offering threat actors a path to persistent access and lateral movement. Once inside, attackers exploit identity-based weaknesses to escalate privileges, disable monitoring, and hijack legitimate accounts, all while flying under the radar of conventional detection tools.

This blog post is tailored for Cloud Architects, shedding light on the growing wave of identity-enabled cloud attacks. We’ll explore the systemic challenges, the evolving tactics of adversaries, and strategic interventions that enable resilience in an increasingly hostile digital landscape.

The Identity Crisis: Why Credentials Have Become the Crown Jewels

In the cloud, identity is everything. Unlike traditional IT infrastructures, where access might be governed by physical boundaries or network segmentation, the cloud relies fundamentally on Identity and Access Management (IAM) protocols. This means that whoever holds the keys—whether a human or machine identity—controls the kingdom.

Cloud-Native Complexity

The average enterprise today utilises over 90 security tools. At the same time, 78% of organisations operate in multi-cloud environments, employing two or more providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. These environments offer varied IAM configurations, creating inconsistencies that can be exploited.

Valid Credentials: The Trojan Horse

Cybercriminals prefer using valid credentials over deploying malware. Stolen credentials grant them access without triggering traditional intrusion detection systems. Once inside, attackers mimic legitimate users, making it exceptionally difficult to detect malicious activity.

From Access to Persistence: The Attacker’s Playbook

Once attackers compromise an identity, their objective shifts from access to persistence. The techniques they employ are sophisticated and designed to circumvent traditional security controls.

Privilege Escalation

Attackers scan for misconfigured IAM roles, excessive permissions, or orphaned accounts. With enough privilege, they can pivot across environments or even create backdoors for future access.

Disabling Logging and Monitoring

By disabling tools such as AWS CloudTrail or Azure Monitor, attackers eliminate the breadcrumbs investigators rely on. This not only delays detection but also hampers incident response.

Lateral Movement and Account Hijacking

Cloud-native environments often involve interconnected services and APIs. Once inside, attackers can move laterally across services, hijack additional accounts, and even manipulate infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates to introduce persistent threats.

Case Study: The Capital One Breach

In one of the most notable cloud-native attacks, a misconfigured firewall allowed a former AWS employee to access over 100 million credit applications. The attacker exploited IAM roles to exfiltrate sensitive data undetected, underlining the criticality of proper identity governance.

The Alert Fatigue Epidemic

With the average team managing more than 90 tools and receiving thousands of alerts daily, distinguishing between signal and noise has become a major operational bottleneck.

• 60% of security teams report being overwhelmed by alerts and false positives.
• 85% of security leaders admit that their threat detection capabilities have stagnated or declined in the past year.

The Cost of Complacency

Alert fatigue not only leads to missed threats but also contributes to burnout and high turnover in security teams. This, in turn, exacerbates vulnerabilities, creating a vicious cycle of exposure.

Strategic Response

• Unified Security Platforms: Consolidating tools into a unified cloud-native security platform reduces complexity.
• Automation and AI: Employing machine learning to triage alerts can significantly reduce noise and highlight high-fidelity threats.
• Risk-Based Prioritisation: Mapping alerts to business impact ensures that the most critical threats receive immediate attention.

Multi-Cloud Environments: Double the Clouds, Triple the Risks

Operating across multiple cloud providers is now the norm, but it brings with it a unique set of security challenges.

Fragmented Visibility

Each cloud provider has its own logging, alerting, and IAM systems. Without a centralised view, blind spots emerge.

Inconsistent Policies

A lack of standardisation across platforms leads to policy drift. For example, a secure IAM configuration in AWS may not directly translate to Azure, leaving exploitable gaps.

Proactive Measures

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): Continuously evaluates misconfigurations across cloud environments.
• Cross-Cloud IAM Governance: Standardising identity policies and automating compliance checks.
• Vendor-Agnostic Tools: Leveraging security tools that provide consistent visibility across all platforms.

The Role of Cloud Architects in Mitigating Identity-Enabled Attacks

Cloud Architects hold the strategic responsibility of embedding security within the fabric of cloud deployments.

Designing for Least Privilege

Architectures should adopt zero-trust principles, granting only the permissions necessary for each identity.

Emphasising Identity Hygiene

Implement regular audits, rotate credentials, disable unused accounts, and enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Embedding Observability

Ensure all components are observable and auditable. Implement immutable logging to prevent tampering.

Secure-by-Design Approach

Security should not be an afterthought but a foundational pillar in all cloud-native designs. Use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) with embedded security policies.

Business Impact and Executive Considerations

C-Suite executives must understand that identity-enabled attacks are not just technical nuisances—they are strategic business threats.

Financial Loss

Data breaches can cost millions in fines, legal fees, and reputational damage. Persistent access by threat actors can lead to intellectual property theft and loss of competitive advantage.

Operational Disruption

Attackers who control identities can sabotage cloud workloads, disable services, and halt business operations.

Regulatory Non-Compliance

GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulations demand rigorous identity and access controls. Non-compliance risks severe penalties.

ROI on Identity Security

Investments in identity security yield high returns through risk mitigation, reduced downtime, and enhanced customer trust.

Looking Ahead: Future-Proofing Cloud Security

As threat actors become more adept, the defence must be dynamic and forward-looking.

Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)

Emerging as a critical component of XDR (Extended Detection and Response), ITDR tools focus specifically on identity-based threats.

Behavioural Analytics

Understanding baseline identity behaviour enables quicker identification of anomalies.

Decentralised Identity Models

Blockchain-based identity models offer promise for creating tamper-proof credentials.

Workforce Training

Upskilling teams to understand the nuances of cloud-native security is essential. Simulation-based training can help teams react faster in real-world scenarios.

From Awareness to Action

The rise of cloud-native and identity-enabled attacks represents a fundamental shift in the cyber threat landscape. For Cloud Architects, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. By adopting a proactive, identity-centric security posture, organisations can turn the tide against persistent adversaries.

Security in the cloud is not just about prevention—it’s about preparedness, adaptability, and resilience. The time to act is now.

When Penetration Testers from OMVAPT step in, they do more than just test—they transform cloud security postures.

Here’s how they come to the rescue in the context of cloud-native and identity-enabled attacks:

🔍 1. Real-World Simulations of Identity Attacks

OMVAPT’s Penetration Testers simulate sophisticated attacks that mirror real-world scenarios—like stolen credentials, privilege escalation, or lateral movement across cloud services. This shows exactly how far an attacker could go after gaining valid access.

🛡️ Impact: Cloud Architects and security teams gain clarity on where defences are weak and which identities are most vulnerable.

🛠️ 2. Misconfiguration Detection at Scale

Using a blend of automated tools and manual assessment, OMVAPT uncovers:

• Over-permissive IAM roles
• Unused service accounts
• Lack of MFA enforcement
• Publicly exposed storage buckets
• Weak API gateway configurations

🔁 These findings help architects shift left, integrating security into the design phase instead of firefighting post-deployment.

🧠 3. Threat Modelling & Attack Path Mapping

OMVAPT provides visual, actionable threat models that show:

• Potential paths attackers could take
• Which credentials they’d target first
• What happens when logging is disabled or alerts go ignored

📉 This directly reduces risk exposure and helps justify budgets for architectural changes or tool consolidation.

📊 4. Executive Reporting that Speaks ROI

OMVAPT delivers C-level reporting that doesn’t just highlight vulnerabilities—it quantifies business impact. Reports include:

• Cost of breach scenarios
• Compliance risks (GDPR, HIPAA, etc.)
• ROI of closing specific gaps

🎯 Perfect for aligning security priorities with business objectives.

🔁 5. Continuous Testing & DevSecOps Integration

Instead of just point-in-time tests, OMVAPT supports continuous security validation in CI/CD pipelines—ensuring that identity-related flaws don’t sneak into production environments.

🔐 Security becomes proactive, not reactive.

In Summary

OMVAPT Penetration Testers bring clarity, confidence, and control to cloud security operations. They turn identity blind spots into visibility, complexity into strategy, and cloud chaos into hardened architecture.

Here’s a tailored example of how OMVAPT’s Penetration Testers conducted a cloud assessment for a mid-sized enterprise operating in a multi-cloud environment—and uncovered a high-risk, identity-enabled attack path that had gone undetected for years.

🧪 Case Study: Stopping an Invisible Cloud Intrusion

👥 Client Profile

• Industry: FinTech
• Cloud Providers: AWS & Azure
• Stack: Serverless (Lambda, Azure Functions), Kubernetes, IAM-based microservices
• Security Team: 5 members managing ~110 tools across clouds

🎯 Objective

The client needed OMVAPT to test their multi-cloud infrastructure for:

• Identity abuse scenarios
• Privilege escalation paths
• Misconfigurations invisible to their CSPM tools
• Gaps in alerting/logging

🔍 OMVAPT’s Approach

1. Reconnaissance
   
   OMVAPT started with passive enumeration, identifying leaked API keys on GitHub and unused access tokens on private repositories.
   
2. Initial Access (Identity-Based)
   
   Using a leaked developer token (which had not been rotated in 14 months), testers accessed a low-privilege IAM role on AWS.
   
3. Privilege Escalation
   
   The testers discovered a misconfigured Lambda function with an inline policy that allowed iam:PassRole. They used this to impersonate a high-privilege role.
   
4. Lateral Movement (Azure)
   
   Through an exposed Kubernetes ConfigMap containing hardcoded Azure credentials, the team pivoted to the client’s Azure subscription and gained access to a CosmosDB instance.
   
5. Persistence and Logging Evasion
   
   The team disabled AWS CloudTrail in a non-monitored region, created a stealthy IAM user, and set up automated task-based triggers to reinstate access if deleted.
   
6. Detection Test
   
   The client’s SIEM reported no alerts. The security team remained unaware for 48 hours until OMVAPT’s red team debriefed them.
   

📊 Findings Summary

🧠 Recommendations Delivered

• Enforce zero-trust IAM with role-based access controls
• Rotate all access tokens automatically every 30 days
• Enable immutable logging and guardrails in all regions
• Deploy Cloud-Native Detection & Response (CNDR) tools
• Implement least-privilege IaC policies with automated tests

📈 Business Impact

• Risk of data exfiltration across two CSPs = ~$3.2 million in potential regulatory fines and downtime
• Time to remediate after OMVAPT assessment = 11 days
• Executive board approved a 33% increase in the cloud security budget

Here’s a detailed, realistic simulation of another OMVAPT engagement, this time focused on Kubernetes cluster hardening and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) security.

🧪 Case Study: OMVAPT’s Mission to Harden Kubernetes & Azure AD

👥 Client Profile

• Sector: Healthcare SaaS
• Infrastructure: Hybrid Cloud (Azure + on-prem)
• Authentication: Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
• Orchestration: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with private clusters
• Compliance Mandate: HIPAA, GDPR

🎯 Engagement Goals

• Identify misconfigurations in Azure AD roles, conditional access, and MFA
• Detect privilege escalations and persistence vectors in Kubernetes
• Validate RBAC implementation across AKS
• Test the logging and alerting mechanisms in Microsoft Defender for Cloud

🔍 OMVAPT’s Dual-Vector Testing Approach

A. Azure AD Attack Simulation

1. Password Spray & Legacy Protocols

Despite conditional access policies, testers discovered several accounts still accepting legacy authentication protocols (e.g., POP, IMAP). A slow, targeted password spray yielded valid credentials for a junior developer.

2. MFA Bypass via Conditional Access Gaps

The account was not enforced with MFA because of a “trusted IP” exception that mistakenly included a large IP range used by public users.

3. Privilege Escalation via OAuth Abuse

Using the compromised credentials, testers consented to a rogue enterprise application via the OAuth 2.0 Authorisation Grant. This allowed:

• Read access to mailbox data
• Persistent tokens with background access
• Stealth, long-term access even if passwords changed

🧠 Insight: Most teams don’t monitor user-consented apps, which became a hidden persistence backdoor.

B. Kubernetes Cluster Penetration

1. Pod Security Policy Bypass

OMVAPT exploited a vulnerable container with hostPath volume mounting, escaping the pod and accessing the underlying node. No admission controller stopped this.

2. Insecure ServiceAccount Tokens

Several workloads had auto-mounted service account tokens with cluster-admin privileges, violating least-privilege principles.

3. Etcd Exploitation

A misconfigured etcd node (K8s database) was accessible internally without encryption. Testers dumped secrets, including:

• Admin kubeconfig
• TLS keys
• Secrets for database and internal APIs

4. Network Lateral Movement

Flat networking in the cluster allowed movement between namespaces and access to a privileged container running kubectl with stored credentials.

🧠 Insight: RBAC is only as strong as network segmentation and API gateway enforcement.

🧾 Findings Summary

🛡️ Remediation & Hardening Recommendations

🔐 Azure AD

• Disable legacy protocols tenant-wide
• Narrow “trusted IP” exceptions and enforce MFA universally
• Block user consent to unverified apps
• Monitor OAuth grant activity in audit logs
• Use conditional access policies with device compliance signals

⚙️ Kubernetes

• Enforce PodSecurityStandards (restricted) and use OPA/Gatekeeper
• Disable auto-mounting of service account tokens
• Encrypt etcd with client-cert-based mutual TLS
• Isolate workloads with Kubernetes Network Policies
• Integrate Microsoft Defender for Containers with custom alerting

📈 Business Value Realised

💼 Executive Outcome: Security budget reallocated to identity hardening, and AKS was added to quarterly red teaming schedule. A new DevSecOps policy was introduced based on OMVAPT’s findings.

Here’s a compelling attack simulation story—crafted as a narrative walkthrough of an identity-based cloud-native attack, where OMVAPT’s red team simulated a highly stealthy adversary mimicking real-world threat actors like LAPSUS$ or UNC2452 (SolarWinds breach). This scenario highlights how identity compromise, poor configurations, and alert fatigue can silently unravel cloud environments.

🎭 Attack Simulation Story: “Operation Silent Hydra”

📌 Target: Mid-Sized SaaS Enterprise

• Cloud: Multi-cloud (AWS primary, Azure secondary)
• Identity: Azure AD + SSO integration
• Stack: Microservices, CI/CD via GitHub Actions
• Tools: Microsoft Defender, AWS GuardDuty, Datadog, Splunk, Okta

🔎 Stage 1: Initial Reconnaissance

The OMVAPT red team started by scanning public assets, dev repositories, and social channels for digital breadcrumbs.

• A forgotten GitHub repo contained an old .env file with hardcoded AWS keys.
• A company engineer had reused a personal email for GitHub commits—same email used for Okta login.
• The engineer’s email was linked to a credential breach in a 2021 data dump.

🧠 “Low-hanging fruit can still open premium doors.”

🎯 Stage 2: Identity Compromise

Using the breached credentials, OMVAPT attempted a password spray on the Okta login portal. With no brute-force lockout and legacy authentication enabled, the attacker gained access.

• MFA was not enforced for non-admin roles in dev environments.
• Once inside, the attacker cloned session cookies and created a long-lived OAuth token.

🔐 Outcome: Access to internal dashboards, GitHub CI/CD tokens, and JIRA boards.

⚙️ Stage 3: Cloud Pivot via CI/CD

With access to the GitHub repository, OMVAPT modified a workflow file to exfiltrate environment secrets during deployment.

• These secrets included:
  • AWS Access Keys (with PowerUserAccess)
  • Internal API keys
  • Azure Blob SAS tokens

📦 “CI/CD is often the weakest link between code and cloud.”

🚪 Stage 4: Persistence & Evasion

To remain undetected:

• The team disabled GuardDuty notifications for new access keys.
• Created a new IAM user named metrics-test and attached existing policies to avoid triggering alerts.
• In Azure, a new enterprise app was registered to consent to mailbox read/write with self-granted permissions.

🧊 These actions didn’t raise alarms due to alert fatigue and overlapping noise from dozens of tools.

🧨 Stage 5: Privilege Escalation

Using the stolen AWS credentials, OMVAPT:

• Accessed AWS Lambda functions with environment variables holding RDS credentials.
• Elevated privileges by exploiting iam:PassRole on an unused Lambda role with AdministratorAccess.
• Spun up an EC2 instance in a quiet region (Asia Pacific – Osaka) to test data exfiltration via encrypted tunnels.

💸 They transferred 1GB of dummy customer data as a proof-of-concept exfiltration to an S3 bucket in a red team-controlled account.

🧼 Stage 6: Covering Tracks

• All AWS logs in that region were set to retain only 1 day.
• Defender for Cloud was disabled for the resource group using stolen contributor-level access.
• Azure Audit Logs were routed to a storage account—OMVAPT deleted the storage account.

🚫 No alerts fired. SIEM was overloaded with 150,000 events/day—this breach was buried in noise.

🚨 OMVAPT Debrief & Outcomes

🎥 Simulation Playback for Executives

OMVAPT recorded a timeline replay:

• From initial breach to data exfiltration in under 72 hours
• Zero alerts triggered from high-value systems
• Rooted in identity and permission abuse—not malware

📈 Post-Attack Recommendations

🏆 Results & Executive Response

• Presented a 3D attack path map to the board with asset values and exploited trust chains
• The CEO fast-tracked funding for a dedicated CloudSec team and CNAPP deployment
• OMVAPT was retained for quarterly red teaming and architecture validation

🎤 Final Takeaway:

“It wasn’t malware. It wasn’t a zero-day. It was identity abuse—hiding in plain sight.”

This simulation proved what C-level execs fear most: their defences are only as good as their visibility. OMVAPT didn’t just find the cracks—they exposed how attackers exploit trust, tools, and timing.