Cloud Security Fundamentals

Legacy tokens (including “actor” patterns in S2S flows) and the use of obsolete APIs such as Azure AD Graph have been a dangerous combination: they enable privileged operations without going through the same guardrails we now expect (MFA and Conditional Access). This article breaks down how Global Admin impersonation materializes in Entra ID, what signals to look for, and how to run it in practice to close the gap.

In 2026, most initial intrusions in AWS do not start with an exploit, but with stolen credentials and sessions. This article explains why it happens (including the 83% identity-focused figure), what operational signals reveal it in AWS, and how to harden IAM/STS without breaking corporate operations.

Native Kubernetes Secrets do not “encrypt”: they encode in Base64. In corporate environments this translates into exposure via logs, overly broad RBAC, etcd without encryption, and pipelines that leak credentials. How to understand the real risk and operate External Secrets Operator with Azure Key Vault or AWS Secrets Manager without breaking deployment.

IMDSv1 allows access to metadata and temporary credentials from the instance itself without any anti-SSRF mechanism. In corporate environments, an SSRF in an internal app can end in exfiltration of the instance role’s credentials and escalation in AWS. Enforcing IMDSv2 drastically reduces that risk by requiring per-session tokens.

Origin IP Bypass happens when an attacker discovers the real IP of the origin behind a WAF/CDN (CloudFront, Azure Front Door, Cloudflare) and attacks it directly. The result: your rules and rate limiting no longer apply. Here is how it happens, what signals to spot it in production, and how to close it in a verifiable way.

Synchronizing on‑prem Active Directory with Entra ID or AWS IAM Identity Center without segmentation turns a local incident into a cloud compromise. Identity is the bridge: Pass-the-Hash, Kerberoasting, and misassigned privileges can escalate to global roles if you don’t apply filters, privilege separation, and strict MFA.

Operational guide to the OWASP Top 10 applied to corporate cloud environments: where people fail in production, early signals, real examples, and concrete actions to reduce exposure without slowing teams down.

A realistic postmortem on how a cloud account ended up compromised by old keys associated with service accounts: what went wrong, why the signals arrived late, how the incident was contained, and what controls prevent it from happening again.

Service Accounts in Google Cloud rarely fail due to explicit “malicious intent”: they fail due to forgotten long-lived keys, nonexistent rotation, inherited roles, and access that jumps across projects. An operational guide, with signals and mitigations, based on patterns that repeat in corporate environments.

Azure Managed Identities simplifies credentials, but in production repetitive failures appear: misassigned identities, oversized permissions, and confusion between system-assigned and user-assigned. This article reviews signals, real business impact, and concrete actions to operate them securely.