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In this episode, we’re going to build a beginner-friendly way to tell cloud attacks apart, not by memorizing a long list of tools, but by learning to read two big sets of clues: who was responsible for what, and what was misconfigured. Cloud systems can feel confusing at first because they blur the boundaries between your organization and a provider, and that makes people unsure where security failures actually come from. Attackers take advantage of that uncertainty, because confusion slows down response and creates gaps where risky defaults stay unchallenged. The good news is that you can get surprisingly far with a simple mental model that keeps asking two questions: what did the provider promise to secure, and what did the customer actually configure. When you can answer those, you can often classify the attack path quickly, even if you cannot name every service involved. Our goal is to help you recognize common cloud attack shapes and use shared responsibility and misconfiguration clues to differentiate them.

The starting point is Shared Responsibility Model (S R M), which is the idea that cloud security is divided between the provider and the customer rather than owned entirely by one side. The provider is typically responsible for the security of the underlying cloud infrastructure, like physical data centers, core networking, and foundational service operation. The customer is typically responsible for how they configure and use the services, including who has access, how data is protected, and what is exposed to the internet. Beginners sometimes hear this and think it is a legal concept or a contract detail, but in incident response it is a diagnostic tool. It helps you decide whether a suspicious event likely stems from a provider-side outage or weakness, or from a customer-side configuration that created an opening. Most cloud attacks that affect individual organizations are not because the provider forgot to secure the building, but because the customer left a door unlocked in their own space. Recognizing that pattern early keeps you focused on the controls you can actually change.

Misconfiguration is the other half of the diagnostic method, and it is one of the biggest reasons cloud incidents happen. Misconfiguration means a setting was chosen, inherited, or left as a default in a way that created more exposure than intended. In cloud environments, a single setting can make a storage location public, allow broad access to an administrative interface, or let an internal service talk to the outside world without protection. The tricky part is that cloud platforms make it easy to build quickly, and speed often leads to permissive settings that feel convenient during development. Over time, those permissive settings can become normal, and then people forget they exist. Attackers do not need magic to exploit that; they just need to find the exposed asset and interact with it like any other internet-facing target. When you can spot misconfiguration clues, you can often tell whether an incident is about data exposure, identity compromise, or service abuse, because each of those attack categories tends to leave distinct configuration fingerprints.

One of the fastest ways to differentiate cloud attacks is to decide whether the attacker is primarily abusing identity or primarily abusing exposure. Identity abuse means the attacker is acting like a legitimate user or service, often by stealing credentials, tokens, or keys that unlock cloud resources. Exposure abuse means the attacker is taking advantage of something reachable that should not have been reachable, like an open management interface or a public data store. In identity-led attacks, you often see successful logins, role assumptions, or API activity that looks authorized on paper but suspicious in context. In exposure-led attacks, you often see scanning, direct access to an endpoint, or data downloads that do not require authentication because the resource was configured as public or weakly protected. Both can happen together, but choosing the primary path helps you reason about next steps. The shared responsibility clue here is that identity and access choices are customer-side responsibilities in almost all common cloud setups, while the provider mostly ensures the identity service itself functions securely.

Storage exposure is a common cloud incident category, and it often begins with a misconfiguration that makes data accessible beyond the intended audience. Beginners sometimes assume that if data is in the cloud it must be private by default, but cloud storage can be configured for many patterns, including public content distribution. The clue you look for is whether the storage location was intentionally public, accidentally public, or public because of inherited permissions that nobody noticed. Attackers who find exposed storage often do not need to exploit anything complex; they just list, download, or scrape what is available. The impact is often confidentiality, meaning sensitive data is read or copied, but it can also become integrity if attackers can upload or modify objects. Shared responsibility helps here because the provider delivers the storage service, but the customer chooses the access policy, the sharing settings, and the encryption options. When you hear about a data leak from cloud storage, your first differentiation move is to ask whether access was granted through configuration rather than gained through hacking in the dramatic sense.

Another major category is cloud control plane compromise, which is a way of saying the attacker gained access to the administrative layer that governs cloud resources. The control plane is where you create services, assign permissions, generate keys, and change settings that affect many systems at once. If an attacker compromises the control plane, they can often create new resources, copy data, disable monitoring, and set up persistence through new identities or keys. The clue for control plane compromise is often identity-related, such as suspicious administrative logins, unusual permission changes, or new access keys that were not expected. Misconfiguration clues can still matter, because overly broad permissions, weak role separation, or unused admin accounts can make compromise easier. Shared responsibility matters because control plane security is shared in a specific way: the provider secures the platform that hosts the control plane, but the customer secures who can access it and how. In practice, most incidents in this category are about customer-side identity decisions, not provider-side compromise.

Cloud network exposure is another area where misconfiguration clues can help you differentiate an incident quickly. Cloud networking often involves concepts like security groups, firewall rules, or network access control lists, which act like gates for what can talk to what. A misconfigured rule that allows management access from anywhere, or allows a database port to be open to the internet, can turn an internal service into an external target. The clue here is the presence of unexpected internet-facing access, often discovered after scanning or after seeing suspicious traffic patterns. In many cases, the attacker does not even need to know which organization they are targeting; they simply scan broad address ranges and interact with whatever responds. Shared responsibility is a guide because the provider offers the networking building blocks, but the customer chooses the rule sets and the exposure boundaries. When you see a cloud incident that starts with open ports or exposed interfaces, you should think misconfiguration first, then ask what sensitive services were reachable as a result.

Service abuse is a distinct cloud attack shape that beginners sometimes miss because it does not always look like data theft or account takeover at the start. Service abuse means the attacker uses cloud resources in a way that benefits them, such as running unauthorized compute workloads, using the environment to send large amounts of email, or hosting malicious content. Sometimes this happens after identity compromise, where the attacker uses legitimate permissions to create resources and then consumes them. Sometimes it happens because of exposed interfaces that allow resource creation without adequate checks. The clue is often unusual resource usage, unexpected cost spikes, or creation of resources that do not align with the organization’s normal patterns. Misconfiguration can enable this when permission policies are too broad or when guardrails are missing, allowing resource creation in ways that should have been restricted. Shared responsibility helps you differentiate blame and action, because cost control, resource limits, and identity permissions are typically customer responsibilities, while the provider ensures the underlying service works as designed.

A particularly important differentiation skill is recognizing when a cloud incident is actually rooted outside the cloud, even though cloud systems are where it becomes visible. For example, a user’s password might be stolen through phishing, and then the attacker logs into the cloud console using that identity. That can look like a cloud attack, but the initial access vector is a credential theft event, not a cloud-specific vulnerability. Similarly, a compromised developer workstation might leak access keys stored in a file, and those keys are then used to call cloud APIs and manipulate resources. The cloud is the stage, but the opening move happened elsewhere. Shared responsibility clues help because the provider cannot protect secrets you leave on an endpoint, and misconfiguration clues help because permissive keys and broad permissions turn a stolen key into a wide-reaching tool. Differentiating the root cause from the visible impact is important, because it prevents you from chasing the wrong fix, like focusing only on a cloud setting when the real issue is identity hygiene and secret handling.

Another helpful way to differentiate cloud attacks is to look for the mismatch between intended architecture and actual exposure, which is often where misconfiguration hides. Many organizations intend to keep sensitive systems private behind internal boundaries, but cloud makes it easy to accidentally connect internal systems to the public internet. That mismatch can show up as public endpoints that were not meant to exist, access policies that grant broader rights than intended, or services deployed in the wrong place with the wrong defaults. Attackers are excellent at finding mismatches because mismatches create inconsistent signals, like a database accessible from anywhere or a storage bucket that lists its contents publicly. When you hear about an incident, ask whether the exploited resource was supposed to be internal, and if so, how it became externally reachable. Shared responsibility keeps you focused on customer-controlled configuration, and misconfiguration clues help you spot the specific kind of mistake that allowed exposure. Over time, you will notice that many cloud incidents are not mysterious; they are the predictable result of mismatched intent and settings.

Cloud incidents also have a particular kind of evidence pattern that can guide differentiation, even for beginners. Identity-led attacks often produce audit trails that show who did what, such as logins, role changes, key creation, and administrative actions. Exposure-led attacks may produce access logs that show downloads, requests, and unusual traffic to endpoints. Service abuse often produces resource telemetry, such as sudden spikes in compute usage, networking traffic, or costs. None of these signals alone proves intent, but together they help you classify the incident. A critical beginner habit is to notice whether the suspicious activity is happening through normal administrative interfaces and APIs, which suggests identity abuse, or through unauthenticated access paths, which suggests exposure. Shared responsibility helps because it tells you which controls you can tighten quickly, like access policies and authentication requirements. Misconfiguration clues help because they often explain why an attacker did not need to bypass defenses at all.

To bring all of this together, consider how you would talk about an incident in a way that guides action rather than blame. If you can say the incident appears identity-led, likely driven by stolen credentials, and amplified by overly broad permissions, you immediately point to actions like session revocation, key rotation, and permission review. If you can say the incident appears exposure-led, likely driven by public access misconfiguration, you immediately point to actions like restricting access, reviewing sharing settings, and verifying what data was accessible. If you can say the incident appears to be service abuse, likely driven by compromised access keys and missing guardrails, you point to actions like disabling keys, restricting resource creation, and monitoring usage anomalies. You do not need to be a cloud engineer to make these distinctions at a high level. You need the habit of reading shared responsibility as a map of control ownership and reading misconfiguration as a clue about how the door was opened.

As we close, the main skill you are building is the ability to differentiate cloud attacks by quickly deciding what the attacker abused and what mistake or gap made it possible. Shared Responsibility Model gives you the boundary line between provider-managed infrastructure and customer-managed configuration, and most organization-specific incidents fall on the customer-managed side. Misconfiguration clues help you tell whether the opening was public exposure, overly broad access rights, weak network boundaries, or missing guardrails around resource creation. Identity abuse, exposure abuse, and service abuse are three big cloud attack shapes that can overlap, but choosing the primary one helps you reason about likely impact and likely next steps. When you combine these ideas, cloud attacks become less intimidating, because you are no longer trying to memorize every cloud service. Instead, you are reading the story of responsibility and configuration, and using that story to classify what happened and what must change to prevent it from happening again.