Understanding 6 Types of Cloud Security Breaches in 2025

[qualysec]

Introduction

Cloud security breaches pose one of the most pressing issues in organizations worldwide, as companies rapidly transition to cloud infrastructures. By 2025, cybercriminals will still be developing innovative techniques to exploit flaws in cloud environments. According to recent statistics, 83 percent of organizations have experienced a minimum of a single case of security breach in the clouds in the past 18 months, proving the essential issue of being conversant with these risks.
 
Cloud Computing has complicated the security issue, giving rise to new avenues of attack that are not necessarily covered by traditional methods of security. Knowledge about the kinds of security breaches and Cloud Computing Vulnerabilities is vital, as they allow an organization to come up with countermeasures to shield its vital information against evil players. In this guide, we will analyse six severe forms of cloud security breaches that organisations are likely to experience in 2025 and how to go about preventing them, and also reduce the risk of data leakage in cloud computing.

The Rising Threat Landscape of Cloud Security
The situation with the cloud security breaches in 2025 is an unmatched challenge to organizations. The medium of cloud technologies has been faster than the security measures, making it susceptible to abuse by cybercriminals.

Current State of Cloud Security Breaches
The statistics surrounding security breaches in cloud computing paint a concerning picture:

• 45% of all data breaches now occur in cloud environments, officially surpassing on-premises incidents
  
• 82% of cloud security breaches are attributed to human error and a lack of proper visibility
  
• 25% of organizations fear they may have experienced an internal security breach in cloud computing without awareness
  
• Companies face 2,300 cyberattacks weekly, with cloud-focused attacks increasing 13% annually
  

Key Contributing Factors
Several serious factors facilitate the heightening of cloud security breaches:

• Misconfiguration crisis: 23 percent of incidents are a misconfiguration of the cloud done by humans, and 82 percent of these are human errors
  
• Visibility gaps: 32 per cent of cloud assets are unmonitored and have around 115 identified vulnerabilities each
  
• Multi-cloud complexity: 79% of the respondents are utilizing the services of multiple cloud providers, and 56 percent of them have data protection issues
  
• Skills shortage: 45 percent of companies do not have qualified cybersecurity personnel in key positions
  

6 Critical Types of Cloud Security Breaches in 2025

1. Identity and Access Management (IAM) Breaches
Identity and access breaches are the most common form of cloud security breach in 2025, acting as the biggest source of attack by cybercriminals on cloud use.

• Credential theft mechanisms: Attackers employ slick phishing campaigns, social engineering tricks, and credential stuffing attacks to search for cracked user accounts and acquire introductory access to cloud environments.
  
• Privilege escalation techniques: Attackers who gain access to cloud infrastructure systems exploit weaknesses in cloud infrastructure security, using excessive access privileges and poor access controls to travel across cloud infrastructure and gain access to sensitive information.
  
• Federated identity vulnerabilities: Hybrid cloud systems present a wide variety of trust relationships between on-premises and cloud infrastructures, and this diversity leaves the attacker with a variety of vectors of attack.
  
• Multi-factor authentication bypasses: Threat actors use smishing, SIM jacking, and malware to bypass the use of multi-factor authentication.
  

2. Data Exposure Through Misconfigured Cloud Storage
Data breaches in cloud computing security remain a primary point of concern due to misconfigured cloud storage, as organizations end up exposing sensitive data to illegal access.

• Public storage containers: Unsecured S3 buckets, Azure Blob storage, and Google Cloud Storage boxes in the open leave terabytes of sensitive data, such as customer records and intellectual property, exposed.
  
• Default security settings: It have observed that most often organizations use standard configurations within cloud services, which do not offer maximum protection because they customized them with the view of increasing accessibility rather than the safety of the information concerned.
  
• Overpermissive access controls: Permission levels set during the initial configuration remain unchanged and allow the wrong people to gain sensitive information.
  
• Automated discovery by attackers: Malicious actors have automated ways of scanning publicly available cloud storage containers, increasing the efficiency of the discovery of vulnerable data.
  

3. API Security Breaches
Security threats to APIs have become a significant source of vulnerability as organizations continue using APIs to integrate their cloud services and communicate.

• Authentication vulnerabilities: Weak authentication of APIs via poor API keys and API token verification allows attackers with ready access points.
  
• Injection attacks: SQL injection, NoSQL injection, and command injection attacks via API parameters enable an attacker to manipulate cloud databases and services.
  
• Rate limiting bypasses: Malicious network actors intentionally abuse inherited and ineffectively designed rate-limiting mechanisms to deliver smelly denial-of-service attacks that can overload cloud-based facilities
  
• Data exposure risks: APIs tend to expose too much data, placing attackers in a position to derive sensitive information if they acquire access during the legitimate uses of the APIs.
  

4. Supply Chain and Third-Party Service Breaches
Attacks on the supply chain targeting cloud instances have blown up, and the effectiveness of being able to compromise one vendor to reach several destinations is understandable to the attacker.

• Vendor account compromises: Hackers seek out the compromises of third-party service providers who manage to access numerous environments, thus exposing data breaches in cloud computing to many companies
  
• Malicious software dependencies: Attackers compromise the dependencies and libraries in cloud applications, giving themselves a backdoor to infiltrate sensitive systems and data.
  
• CI/CD pipeline infiltration: An adversary gains access to continuous integration and deployment pipelines in order to add malicious code to cloud applications during the development cycle.
  
• Inadequate vendor oversight: The companies fail to assess the security of cloud service providers adequately, and this forms a blind spot within the security positions of the organisations.
  

5. Insider Threat Breaches
The challenges of insider threats in cloud environments are different, as more usual monitoring and restriction of access capabilities are not adequate to observe suspicious or foolish insider activity.

• Privileged user misuse: Users with higher access privileges can misuse them and steal sensitive information or crash the cloud services without being detected for a long duration
  
• Negligent data handling: Even the best employees can, out of negligence, cause data leakage in cloud computing in an unauthorised manner, misconfigure, and/or maintain insufficient security procedures
  
• Compromised insider accounts: Insider attacks are normally through employee accounts or insider access, which have been compromised to deny original access to the security systems
  
• Inadequate offboarding processes: There is no system to revoke access to the systems by ex-workers, and it takes a long time before they are completely out of access to cloud systems, creating chances of either deliberate or unintentional security breaches
  

6. Ransomware and Malware Breaches
Ransomware attacks on the cloud have advanced, and attackers have come up with cloud-oriented strategies to inflict maximum losses and ransom payments.

• Cloud-native ransomware: The new types of ransomware are specifically organized to attack cloud storage, databases, and virtual machines, and encrypt the data concurrently with several cloud services.
  
• Backup system targeting: Attackers specifically target cloud backup systems so that there is no other option or method to recover, so they have to pay off the ransom demands.
  
• Double extortion tactics: Cybercriminals can lock up data with data theft, demanding a ransom by threatening to publish superior information in case of failure to pay the ransom.
  
• Lateral movement techniques: Inside cloud environments, the ransomware operators leverage the allowed cloud security tools to move throughout the infrastructure easily, and it is hard to detect and encapsulate them.
  

Resource: https://qualysec.com/cloud-security-breaches/