TIP · 4 min read

Hardening Your Cloud in 5 Steps

Most cloud breaches don't come from zero-days — they come from misconfigured buckets, over-permissive IAM and forgotten public endpoints. Here is the 5-step checklist I run on every cloud engagement.

1. Enforce least-privilege IAM

Audit every role and policy. Replace wildcard actions with explicit ones and rotate long-lived access keys for short-lived STS tokens.

Remove `*` from production policies
Enforce MFA on root and admin
Use SSO + permission sets

2. Close public exposure

Scan every account for public S3, open security groups and unauthenticated endpoints. Use CSPM to catch drift continuously.

3. Encrypt everything

KMS-managed encryption at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit, and customer-managed keys for sensitive workloads.

4. Centralize logging & detection

Stream CloudTrail / Azure Activity / GCP Audit into a SIEM. Build detections for IAM changes, console logins from new geos and resource deletions.

5. Practice the breach

Run tabletop exercises and red-team drills against the cloud. If you've never tested response, you don't have response.

Tools mentioned

ProwlerScoutSuiteTrivyCheckovAWS Security Hub

⟩ takeaway

Cloud security is a hygiene problem before it's a tooling problem. Get these five right and you remove 80% of the common attack paths.

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