Governance Briefing — January 22, 2020
The NSA published guidance on mitigating cloud vulnerabilities, highlighting misconfigurations in identity, network segmentation, and logging that enable data exposure and urging administrators to enforce least privilege and continuous monitoring.
Executive briefing: On , the National Security Agency released the report Mitigating Cloud Vulnerabilities, detailing frequent cloud weaknesses including overly permissive IAM policies, flat network architectures, unprotected management interfaces, and insufficient audit logging.
Why it matters: The advisory provides concrete architectural and operational controls organizations can adopt immediately to reduce risk from cloud account takeover and data exfiltration.
- Identity and access: Enforce least privilege, enable MFA for administrators, and constrain role assumptions with context-aware policies.
- Segmentation: Isolate management planes from workloads; restrict inbound access with security groups and service endpoints rather than broad internet exposure.
- Visibility: Turn on provider-native logging (e.g., CloudTrail, Activity Logs) and ship to centralized SIEM with retention aligned to legal requirements.
- Change control: Apply infrastructure-as-code reviews and automated drift detection to prevent configuration regressions that re-open public access.