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Your Cloud Security Checklist Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does

Intruder's 2026 Cloud Security Index found misconfiguration risk profiles differ sharply across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud across 3,000 organizations.

Intruder analyzed misconfiguration data from 3,000 organizations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for its 2026 Cloud Security Index. Weak IAM controls and missing logging affected 80-98% of accounts regardless of provider, while exposed services ranged from 76% on AWS to just 8% on Google Cloud. Top issues included S3 buckets without HTTPS enforcement (87% of AWS accounts), Entra ID users without MFA (55% of Azure accounts), and missing OS Login MFA (77% of Google Cloud accounts). Weak IAM prevalence rose with organization size, from 87% at SMEs to 98% at large enterprises, and midmarket organizations took the longest to remediate at 35 days on average.

The Hacker News · 9d agoResearch

Weak IAM affects up to 98% of cloud environments

Intruder's 2026 Cloud Security Index finds weak IAM controls affect up to 98% of cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Intruder's 2026 Cloud Security Index report analyzed cloud misconfigurations across midmarket and enterprise environments, finding weak IAM controls and missing logging affected 80% to 98% of accounts across all three major providers. AWS recorded the highest prevalence in five of six categories, including exposed services at 76% versus 8% on Google Cloud. IAM weaknesses worsen with scale, affecting 87% of SMEs, 95% of midmarket organizations, and 98% of large enterprises, while remediation times peak at 35 days for organizations with 1,000 to 5,000 employees.

Help Net Security · Aug 14, 2026Research

Unmasking Cloud Identities: From Behavioral Clustering to Automated Detection

Unit 42 clusters behavior of 40,000+ AWS identities from 125 cloud environments to map functional roles and enable lightweight SQL-based detection.

Palo Alto Unit 42 built an unsupervised behavioral clustering model using UMAP and HDBSCAN on AWS CloudTrail logs to map cloud identities to functional roles such as administrators, backup services, security tooling and DevOps. The study analyzed over 40,000 identities across 125 cloud environments over two months. The researchers show that heuristics extracted from the clustering map can be implemented in standard SQL, enabling role classification at scale without running a continuous ML pipeline. The methodology extends to audit logs from other cloud providers, SaaS and Kubernetes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 3d agoResearch

Linux Detection Engineering - Local Privilege Escalation

Elastic details a layered detection framework for Linux local privilege escalation, covering 2026's copy-on-write bug wave and LLM-assisted discovery.

Elastic Security Labs describes how most Linux local privilege escalations share a common host flow — an unprivileged process launched from a writable path becoming root — and proposes layered detections combining general outcome-based rules with per-technique rules in Elastic Defend and Auditd. It tracks 13 recent LPE disclosures, seven of which share a copy-on-write/zero-copy bug class, including Copy Fail, DirtyFrag, Fragnesia, DirtyDecrypt, DirtyClone, pedit COW, and RefluXFS. Qualys attributes RefluXFS to an LLM-assisted research effort with Anthropic using Claude Mythos Preview, and another bug is credited to an LLM-assisted workflow. Detection and endpoint rules are published in Elastic's detection-rules and protections-artifacts repositories.

Elastic Security Labs · 6d agoResearch1

Mapping out your unknown: A threat hunter’s guide to GitHub

Datadog Security Labs publishes a threat-hunting guide with audit-log queries to detect GitHub token theft, device code phishing, and source code exfiltration.

Datadog's threat-hunting guide covers GitHub audit log queries for detecting compromised accounts, stolen personal access tokens, and malicious OAuth app authorizations. Attackers typically obtain credentials through phishing, credential stuffing, leaked secrets, or device code phishing, then map private repositories, exfiltrate source code, and pivot into connected cloud and CI/CD environments. The guide maps detections to MITRE techniques like T1078 and T1528 and documents GitHub logging quirks affecting attribution, token metadata, and visibility fields.

Datadog Security Labs · 1d agoResearch in the wild1

Package Manager Trends

Sixteen-week roundup finds package managers converging on release-age cooldowns, install-script blocking, malware scans, and recurring path-traversal and credential-leak fixes.

The author aggregates supply-chain security trends from sixteen weeks of This Week in Package Management, built from about 80 RSS feeds. Release-age cooldown gates shipped in Deno 2.8, Bundler, npm, Yarn, mise, Hex, Mamba, and Cargo, with Dependabot making a three-day cooldown default in August. npm 12 and Bun 1.4 now block lifecycle install scripts by default, and Composer 2.10 and uv added install/publish-time malware checks, while npm's registry began scanning at publish time. Path traversal on archive extraction was fixed in 14 of 16 weeks across tools including uv, pnpm, Docker, and Composer, and credential-misdirection bugs affected Cargo, ORAS, Composer, and Renovate.

Lobsters · security · 6d agoResearch1

AD Rights Management Service (Part 2): Extraction, Offline Decryption, and the Unrotatable Key

Huntress research shows AD RMS SLC root key is unrotatable and never expires, so its compromise permanently exposes all RMS-protected documents.

Part 2 of Huntress's AD RMS series details server-side attacks: extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key and performing offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC key has no expiry or rotation mechanism, with a 255-year certificate validity (2002–2258), so whoever recovers it can decrypt every document the deployment ever protected, indefinitely. The author released SharpRMS, a unified tool combining the 2016 DisARMS client-side attacks with new server-side key extraction and decryption capabilities. The research frames the SLC as comparable to KRBTGT and the DPAPI domain backup key, though not equivalent to domain compromise.

Huntress · 7d agoResearch

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 27d agoResearch2