Cloud Threat Hunting and Defense Landscape

Insikt Group identifies five major attack vectors impacting cloud environments—vulnerability exploitation, endpoint misconfiguration, credential abuse/account takeover, cloud abuse, and cloud ransomware—detailing how they enable initial access, privilege escalation, and cross‑environment pivoting in hybrid infrastructures. The report emphasizes robust logging and cloud-native security controls (e.g., WAF, IAM, secrets management, resilient backups) to detect and mitigate abuse, highlights growing criminal use of legitimate cloud resources (including cryptojacking and emerging LLMjacking), and advises extending visibility and controls beyond the cloud to connected users, devices, and on‑prem systems.