Attack Paths in the Cloud

In traditional environments, an attack path often reads like a sequence of exploits. In the cloud, it reads more like a sequence of permissions. The attacker rarely needs a zero-day; they need an exposed starting point and a chain of identity and configuration that carries them to something valuable.

A typical cloud path

Consider a path that shows up again and again in cloud environments:

1. An internet-facing resource — say a load balancer or a public function — provides the entry point.
2. That resource runs with an identity that has more permissions than it needs.
3. Those permissions allow access to another service, or the ability to assume a more privileged role.
4. The escalated identity can reach a production data store.

No single step is exotic. Each is a reasonable-looking configuration on its own. The risk lives in the sequence, and the sequence is invisible if you only look at findings one at a time.

Why cloud makes this worse — and easier

Cloud makes these paths easier to create: permissions are easy to grant, resources spin up constantly, and defaults are not always conservative. But cloud also makes the paths easier to see, because almost everything is described in metadata — identities, policies, network rules, resource relationships — that can be read and connected programmatically.

That is the opportunity attack-path intelligence takes. By connecting cloud context into a graph and tracing paths from exposed entry points to critical assets, Pacifics turns a sprawl of individually-reasonable settings into a short list of the links that actually carry risk — and then verifies, after a fix, that the path no longer exists.