The 'Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report, Volume 7', released on 18 April 2023, found that threat actors have become adept at exploiting common, everyday issues in the cloud. These issues include misconfiguration, weak credentials, lacking authorisation, unpatched vulnerabilities and malicious open-source software (OSS) packages. The report shows how attackers exploit sensitive data leaks on the dark web and how ransomware can disrupt business operations, including a breakdown of two actual cloud breach incident responses in 2022. 

The report recommends that any cloud workload that would disrupt business operations if it went down should have an automated backup process in place. To avoid a single point of failure, backups should be stored in protected locations isolated from the production environment in multiple locations. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans that include the backup recovery process should be in place for all organisations.