What are Container Threats in Cloud Computing?

The need of Cyber security has become very much essential these days because of increased threats and malicious software. When shifting to the cybersecurity landscape, organizations must implement demand security methods to secure their in-house infrastructure and cloud-native applications. Containers are the recent trend in the IT industry and nowadays they are present everywhere. According to the survey, 75% of global organizations are using containers in production.

What are Containers?

They are software program packages that contain all major components that include libraries, configuration files, and binaries to run an application in an environment. Containers visualize the operating system and can be run from anywhere. Since the usage of containers is increasing day by day and the cyber security issues are increasing at a faster pace. Containers are very easy to manage with orchestration tools like Kubernetes but they can also cause vulnerabilities that will lead organizations to heavy losses.

What are Container Threats?

Containers have certain security advantages but present now the cybersecurity concerns and risks that could have a significant impact on the organization. Several organizations which use containers fail to realize the security risks and adopt proper security measures. Containers’ security concerns have grown in recent years as cloud-native and container-based applications.

Organizations are implementing cloud-native security measures, but cybercriminals are finding out new ways to breach the entire system.  The traditional container technique is not safeguarding today’s high-risk settings, especially when multiple threats threaten the organization and customers.  To overcome this issue, organizations should implement very strict cloud security procedures to ensure robust security for containers and associated to applications.

Most common Container Threats

1. Malware in Containers

It is a malicious code that is installed in the container. The malicious code can enter containers at various phases of their life span. An attacker who gets the access to CI/CD environment can install malware to source code repositories that can be used later to produce container images. In another type, the attacker may also compromise the container registry and replace the photos with malware-affected ones. The last type of malware attack dupes users into downloading harmful container images from third-party websites.

Malware should be detected before the launch of the container access through the runtime environment or else it may cause various risks like stealing sensitive data from an application or disturbing other containers.

2. Containers having Sensitive data

They are not designed for storing the data but some organizations make the mistake of putting critical information within container images. For example, ABC organizations were disclosed when someone uncovered a container registry that ABC assumed was private but was publicly accessible and turned out to be storing images containing source code.

3. Insecure Container Privileges

They are mostly executed in unprivileged mode, which means they have no access to resources outside of the containerized environment that they control directly. The communication between the containers has to be controlled unless the containers have a specific reason to speak with one another. Security issues arise when containers are permitted to run with more rights than they require. Containers orchestrated by Kubernetes may be granted greater privileges than necessary if Kubernetes security contexts and network policies are not properly established.

Conclusion

With the growing use of containers in the cloud, organizations have several security concerns which can lead to data breaches and cyber-attacks. By adding various authentication and authorization layers with certain container tools container threats can be avoided. Container security is very crucial and organizations must regularly monitor for risks throughout the container life span.

Sapizon Technologies is a leading provider of cloud services to many organizations. We have a team of seasoned professionals to make your container environment safe and secure at any time.

Visit sapizon for more details.