Wiz Report Finds Widespread Sensitive-Data Exposure in Cloud Environments
Summary
Wiz Research analyzed hundreds of thousands of cloud accounts and found widespread exposure risks, including sensitive data on public-facing workloads, databases lacking access controls, and vulnerable exposed containers.
Key points
- 54% of cloud environments had publicly exposed VMs or serverless instances containing sensitive information.
- 35% had VMs or serverless instances that exposed sensitive data and were vulnerable to high- or critical-severity threats.
- 72% had publicly exposed PaaS databases lacking access controls.
- 12% had containers that were both publicly exposed and exploitable through known vulnerabilities.
- The article recommends assessing exposure, vulnerability, and data sensitivity together to prioritize cloud security work.
Article Details
- Publisher
- Wiz Research
- Scope
- Cloud data exposure and misconfiguration trends across cloud environments.
- Sample Size
- Hundreds of thousands of cloud accounts across organizations of all sizes.
- Key Statistics
- 54% of cloud environments had publicly exposed VMs or serverless instances containing sensitive information such as PII or payment data.
- 35% of cloud environments had VMs or serverless instances that exposed sensitive data and were vulnerable to high- or critical-severity threats.
- 72% of cloud environments had publicly exposed PaaS databases lacking access controls.
- 12% of cloud environments had containers that were publicly exposed and exploitable via known vulnerabilities.
- Recommendations
- Prioritize high-impact overlaps among public exposure, vulnerabilities, and sensitive data.
- Use context to distinguish acceptable public assets from those posing a genuine threat, and prioritize remediation accordingly.
- Continuously monitor cloud-native environments and maintain security hygiene.