Misconfiguration of the cloud is the #1 cause of cloud-based data breaches as Cited by Gartner. Our team started investigating and compiling data in March 2021 from a dozen popular cloud providers in the industry, including the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant Cloud Providers.

Key Findings

• Our research identified nearly 2M database exposures across cloud providers.
• We found more than 1.9M RDP exposures across the dozen cloud providers we investigated.
• Users of OVH were more likely to expose MySQL database services relative to other providers and users of Tencent were significantly more likely to expose RDP services.

The State of Indiana LSA didn't have enough resources to keep track of their attack surface. Needing to gain greater visibility into their remote workforce and dealing with a complex cloud migration they began using Censys Home Network Risk Identifier and Attack Surface Management Platform.

• Gain greater visibility into employees logging in remotely and their impact on the attack surface
• Automate their risk management processes and save their security team time
• Track cloud assets over time and identify potential security risks
• Continuously monitor servers for misconfigurations such as unintended port exposures

See how the Censys Attack Surface Management (ASM) Platform helps support specific components of PCI DSS version 3.2.1 compliance and how we assist in iterative and systematic risk assessments for PCI DSS compliance.

Download the Guide

• How the Censys ASM Platform maps to specific PCI DSS version 3.2.1 requirements
• Features in the Censys ASM Platform that assist in iterative and systematic risk assessments for PCI DSS compliance and beyond.
• How to put PCI DSS compliance in context with tooling to help security leaders who want to implement and automate processes for staying PCI compliant.

For more than 165 years, Swiss Life has provided financial security for individuals and corporations. From their start as a life insurance company, to their growth into comprehensive life, pensions and financial services, they serve as an important function from their headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. With locations and teams dispersed throughout Europe, Swiss Life's primary divisions fall within Switzerland, France and Germany, with additional competency centers in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Singapore. Swiss Life Asset Managers offers institutional and private investors access to investment and asset management solutions with locations in Switzerland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the UK and Norway. With an eye towards enterprise governance and compliance, as well as a need for consistent security across dispersed divisions, they reached out to Censys.

In this case study, you'll discover how Censys ASM provided visibility into an expansive organization's internet exposure. Explore the Swiss Life story now.

When your business accelerates faster than your security, effectively monitoring attack surfaces and responding to major vulnerabilities can be difficult. And if you wait days, weeks, or even months to respond — the consequences could be catastrophic.

That's why in the 2022 State of Risk & Remediation Report, the Censys Research Team examined recent celebrity vulnerabilities and how organizations across industries reacted to each. What did we learn, and how can you apply these insights to your own organization?

Download the report to find out:

• What surveyed cybersecurity professionals say are their cyberattack worst-case scenarios
• What Censys observed about three recent vulnerabilities: Log4j, GitLab, and Confluence
• How quickly these vulnerabilities were patched, updated, or taken offline
• The three distinct patterns of response that Censys observed when analyzing and comparing the vulnerabilities
• How security teams can detect similar risks going forward with an Attack Surface Management strategy

This infographic provides data-driven insights into service exposures amongst 12 cloud providers, that can have severe business consequences in impact areas like: data breaches, malware, ransomware, and services that may leave organizations vulnerable to attacks.

Key findings include:

• Nearly 2 million database exposures across cloud providers.
• There are more than 1.9 million RDP exposures across the dozen cloud providers we investigated.
• Users of OVH were more likely to expose MySQL database services relative to other providers and users of Tencent were significantly more likely to expose RDP services and more!

Recent tech headlines tell a clear story that cloud governance and security issues are getting worse. Cloud-originated breaches and data exposures continue to mount, and it is clear that adversaries are increasingly targeting cloud assets to further their criminal ambitions.

There are number of reasons that cloud risks are growing, but data from Dark Reading's The State of Cloud Survey 2021 indicates that one of the biggest is a persistent lack of visibility in organizations, paired with what appears to be overconfidence among IT pros in their capability to keep track of cloud assets and their risk levels.

In this year's survey, we get a glimpse into not only the most common cloud architectures utilized by organizations today and the tools they use to track and manage their cloud assets, but also the perceptions of IT and cloud decision-makers about the overall security afforded by these tools. We then validated those perceptions against an existing body of research data from Censys security experts across real-world cloud deployments observed on the Internet to compare practices reported in the survey to realities in the field.

This study found…

• that the visibility and tracking of Cloud assets remain lackluster
• that a large disparity between research findings and the overconfidence with which respondents believe they are able manage cloud exposures
• which of your Cloud security tooling still needs work
• that overall rogue cloud assets are more common than respondents realize

How much do you understand about the threats you uncover?

As a threat profiler, finding a potential threat is only half your battle. Your next task is making sure the threat is critically understood. In other words, how do you know it's a threat, and how does it pose a risk?

The Censys Research team set out to tackle just that in our own threat profiling expedition. Using the Censys Search tool, we uncovered multiple hosts with Russian ransomware, and collected the evidence needed to say with reasonable confidence that the activity we found was nefarious. You can read all about our profiling expedition — and learn how to apply our techniques to your own threat profiling efforts (wherever they may be focused) — in our new eBook!

Read the eBook to learn:

• How to strategically focus your threat profiling efforts
• How to leverage advanced internet intelligence tools like Censys Search
• When to pivot your profiling investigation and follow new leads
• Drawing conclusions about threats that are critically understood
• Download your copy of the playbook today!

How are you protecting your organization's expanding cloud presence?

Protecting assets in the cloud can pose a unique challenge for security teams. A single misconfiguration — like a storage bucket or database — can lead to a catastrophic data breach.

As more assets move from fixed IP addresses to the ephemeral cloud, visibility can be lost, and the challenge of managing and inventorying what an organization owns can be increasingly difficult — especially when relying on traditional, reactive security approaches.

How can teams effectively bolster their cloud security efforts? It requires thinking like an attacker.

Download this eBook to learn more about:

• Why cloud security is a distinct and increasingly important area of corporate security
• How to adopt an outside-in, "think like an attacker" mentality when developing cloud security protocols
• How Attack Surface Management can empower teams to carry out this "think like an attacker" approach
• Learn how to invest in a proactive security approach today, and expand your cloud presence with confidence going forward.