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Google Cloud Security Threat Horizons Report #12 Is Out!

This is my completely informal, uncertified, unreviewed and otherwise completely unofficial blog inspired by my reading of our next Threat Horizons Report, #12 (full version) that we just released (the official blog for #1 report, my unofficial blogs for #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10 and #11).

My favorite quotes from the report follow below:

“Google Cloud’s latest research highlights that common hygiene gaps like credential issues and misconfigurations are persistently exploited by threat actors to gain entry into cloud environments. During the first half of 2025, weak or absent credentials were the predominant threat, accounting for 47.1% of incidents. Misconfigurations (29.4%) and API/UI compromises (11.8%) followed as the next most frequently observed initial access vectors.“

“Notably, compared to H2 2024, we observed a 4.9% decrease in misconfiguration-based access and a 5.3% decrease in API/UI compromises (i.e., when an unauthorized entity gains access to, or manipulates a system or data through an application’s user-facing screen or its programmatic connections). This shift appears to be partly absorbed by the rise of leaked credentials representing 2.9% of initial access in H1 2025. ” [A.C. — It gently suggests that while we’re making some progress on configurations, the attackers are moving to where the fruit is even more low-hanging: already leaked credentials.]
“Foundational security remains the strongest defense: Google Cloud research indicates that credential compromise and misconfiguration remain the primary entry points for threat actors into cloud environments, emphasizing the critical need for robust identity and access management and proactive vulnerability management.” [A.C. — it won’t be the magical AI that saves you, it would be not given admin to employees]
“Financially motivated threat groups are increasingly targeting backup systems as part of their primary objective, challenging traditional disaster recovery, and underscoring the need for resilient solutions like Cloud Isolated Recovery Environments (CIRE) to ensure business continuity.” [A.C. — if your key defense against ransomware is still backups, well, we got some “news” got you…]
“Advanced threat actors are leveraging social engineering to steal credentials and session cookies, bypassing MFA to compromise cloud environments for financial theft, often targeting high-value assets.” [A.C. — this is NOT an anti-MFA stance, this is a reminder that MFA helps a whole lot, yet if yours can be bypassed, then its value diminishes]
“Threat actors are increasingly co-opting trusted cloud storage services as a key component in their initial attack chains, deceptively using these platforms to host seemingly benign decoy files, often PDFs.“ and “threat actors used .desktop files to infect systems by downloading decoy PDFs from legitimate cloud storage services from multiple providers, a tactic that deceives victims while additional malicious payloads are downloaded in the background” [A.C. — a nice example of thinking about how the defender will respond by the attacker here]
“more traditional disaster recovery approaches, focused primarily on technical restoration, often fall short in addressing the complexities of recovering from a cyber event, particularly the need to re-establish trust with third parties.” [A.C. — The technical recovery is only half the battle. This speaks to the human element of incident response, and the broader impact of a breach.]

Now, go and read the THR 12 report!

30 July 2025

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