Cloud Security Validation: Going Beyond Configuration Scanning for a Stronger Cloud Security Posture

Cloud computing has been one of the most transformational trends of the 21st-century digital economy. According to Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services crossed $595 billion in 2024.¹ Spending will increase even further to over $723 billion in 2025. These numbers show that businesses worldwide have enthusiastically embraced cloud computing. Gartner also predicts that by 2028, cloud computing will become a business necessity due to its “potential to foster innovation, create market disruptions, and enhance customer retention”.²

That said, the accelerated pivot towards the cloud comes at a price: the increasing risk of cyberattacks targeted at cloud environments.

To protect their cloud infrastructure and resources from compromise, organizations need to continuously monitor their cloud environments. Regular scans can reveal misconfigurations and other security weaknesses that increase attack risk. Security teams can then take appropriate and early action to remediate these weaknesses and reduce the risk.

However, simply scanning the cloud infrastructure is not enough to maintain a strong cloud security posture. As new threats emerge and the cloud threat landscape expands, organizations also need to continuously validate their cloud security posture. By combining regular scanning with continuous validation, businesses can substantially boost cloud security and remain resilient to cloud-focused attacks.

The Importance of Continuously Scanning Cloud Environments

As most organizations have migrated to the cloud, threat actors are targeting cloud-hosted infrastructure and resources to gain unauthorized access to enterprise systems and exfiltrate sensitive, business-critical data. Many of these compromises involve the exploitation of persistent weaknesses, such as misconfigured services, insecure APIs, and over-permissioned identities. Human error, zero-day exploits, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) also weaken cloud security and open the door to targeted attacks and data breaches. These incidents often leave organizations burdened with financial losses, reputational damage, regulatory fines, and weakened competitive posture.

To counter these threats and safeguard their cloud infrastructure, resources, and data, enterprise defenders need to maintain full visibility into their entire cloud environment to proactively mitigate emerging risks as they arise. Here’s where cloud security scanning comes in.

How Cloud Scanning Works

Cloud scanning solutions scan dynamic and complex cloud environments, including SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and PaaS (Platform as a Service). These monitoring tools automatically scan the entire cloud estate against predefined security best practices, industry standards like CIS benchmarks, and regulatory requirements. They then compare existing configurations against these “guardrails”, which allow the tools to detect divergences that may cause security or compliance issues, such as misconfigurations, exposed ports, unauthorized modifications, insecure settings, or policy violations.

A small set of these cloud scanning tools also provide remediation guidance with actionable, data-powered insights that enable security teams to proactively remediate cloud threats and prevent cloud-targeted attacks and breaches.

Strengthening Cloud Scanning with Cloud Security Validation

Most cloud scanning tools run scans on a routine schedule, whether that’s hourly or daily, and when detecting potential risks, they trigger alerts that security personnel rely on to proactively minimize the potential for an attack.

Although it has its benefits, cloud scanning has one crucial drawback: most scanning tools have a limited remit (vulnerability detection) and do not perform cloud security validation (CSV). CSV goes beyond simple scanning and involves proactively testing the efficacy of cloud security controls to provide ongoing threat protection and ensure a stronger security posture.

How Cloud Security Validation Works

Cloud security validation starts by emulating the behaviors of real-world attackers within cloud environments. Automated tools execute attack scenarios to identify misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and other vulnerabilities within the cloud infrastructure, cloud workloads, and cloud-hosted applications. Going beyond identifying vulnerabilities, cloud security validation helps security teams determine whether or not the vulnerabilities identified enable viable attack paths that a real adversary could use to establish a foothold or move laterally in their environment. 
The insights from cloud security validation are critical, revealing to security teams if existing security controls and policies are resilient, up to date, and strong enough to defend the organization against real-world threats.

Cloud Security Validation Capabilities

Cloud Security Validation bridges the gap between attack surface visibility and security control validation. While scanning shows you what could go wrong, validation proves what feasibly can go wrong. By continuously testing the effectiveness of your cloud defenses through real-world attack simulations, CSV helps security teams focus their efforts and resources on remediating risks that have proven to have a potential negative impact on the business.

Modern CSV tools, such as Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) platforms, which, in essence, facilitates autonomous red teaming, deliver three critical capabilities that transform how organizations protect their cloud environments:

1. Exposure Discovery and Validation

CSV tools like AEV platforms identify misconfigurations, permission issues, etc., but also take it a step further and validate which of those exposures create viable attack paths. By emulating attacker behavior across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments, security teams gain evidence-backed insight into which weaknesses truly threaten critical assets.

2. Continuous, Automated Testing at Scale

Unlike traditional scanning that runs on fixed schedules, CSV operates continuously. Automated validation ensures that every change to your cloud environment is tested against evolving attack techniques, providing real-time assurance that controls and policies remain effective, without the heavy manual effort that slows most cloud security programs.

3. Contextualized Risk Prioritization

Not every risk warrants equal action and concern. CSV adds context to exposure data by showing the business impact and exploitability of each issue. It also takes up-to-date threat intelligence into account, considering which advanced persistent threat (APT) groups or threat actors would target a particular organization, and the TTPs they have historically used to breach similar organizations. This enables defenders to prioritize and remediate high-risk findings faster, allocate resources more efficiently, and maintain compliance without alert fatigue.

Together, these capabilities elevate cloud security from reactive monitoring to proactive validation, empowering organizations to stay multiple steps ahead of adversaries, even as the cloud threat landscape evolves.

Strengthen Cloud Security Resilience with BreachLock

Your primary cloud security goal may be to:

• Proactively identify and address cloud vulnerabilities before they can be exploited
• Strengthen defenses to secure all your cloud workloads
• Maintain a strong compliance posture

BreachLock’s comprehensive suite of offensive security tools and services makes it possible to achieve all of these goals together, offering solutions that enable continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) of your entire attack surface from discovery to validation and mobilization.

BreachLock Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) automates threat-intelligence-led attack scenarios for cloud environments across multiple threat vectors. It simulates how real adversaries move so you can identify, prioritize, and mitigate true risk within your cloud infrastructure as well as your web applications, mobile applications, APIs, networks, and more. BreachLock AEV provides a clear visual of every step of the cyber kill chain, showing exactly where cloud infrastructure defenses pass and fail, giving security teams the insights needed to make informed, strategic decisions on resource allocation.

BreachLock also provides cloud penetration testing services using human-delivered, AI-powered, and automated solutions through its Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) delivery model. This service is designed to validate the security of your cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. It combines the speed and scalability of automated testing with the expertise and guidance of human experts, so you can test your cloud assets more frequently, regardless of their scale, without missing out on the insights offered by human expert pen testers.

BreachLock’s Attack Surface Management (ASM) solution continuously discovers unknown cloud assets and identifies vulnerabilities across your cloud environment, ensuring that there are no blind spots overlooked in your attack surface. ASM scans for dark web exposures, common vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and more continuously and helps security teams keep an up-to-date inventory of all exposed assets.

Identify cloud vulnerabilities, prioritize exposures, and strengthen your cloud security posture with BreachLock. To learn more about our offensive cloud security validation offerings, contact us for a live demo.

References

1. Gartner. (2024). Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-11-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-total-723-billion-dollars-in-2025
2. Gartner (2023). Gartner Says Cloud Will Become a Business Necessity by 2028. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-11-29-gartner-says-cloud-will-become-a-business-necessity-by-2028

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BreachLock Labs