Venafi, a CyberArk company, has announced the findings of its latest research report: The Impact of Machine Identities on the State of Cloud Native Security in 2024. Surveying 800 security and IT decision-makers from large organizations across the US, UK, France, and Germany, this second annual report examines the top machine identity security trends and challenges impacting the state of cloud native security today.
This year’s findings reveal that attackers are compromising cloud native environments with alarming regularity. 86% of organizations had a security incident related to their cloud native environment within the last year. As a result, 53% of organizations had to delay an application launch or slow down production time; 45% suffered outages or disruption to their application service; and 30% said attackers could gain unauthorized access to data, networks and systems.
Other key findings include:
Service accounts are the next threat frontier: 88% of security leaders believe machine identities – specifically access tokens and their connected service accounts – are the next big target for attackers. Over half (56%) have experienced a security incident related to machine identities using service accounts in the last year.
Supply chain attacks tipped to get an AI makeover: 77% of security leaders think AI poisoning will be the new software supply chain attack. A further 84% believe supply chain attacks remain a clear and present danger. However, a worrying 61% say senior management has taken its focus off supply chain security in the last year.
Security and developer teams continue to clash: 68% of security leaders believe security professionals and developers will always be at odds, with 54% feeling they are fighting a losing battle trying to get developers to have a security-first mindset.
AI threats loom large
Respondents also reported the risk of cloud native security coming under increasing pressure as attackers target these environments to compromise AI models and applications:
- 77% are concerned about AI poisoning, whereby AI data inputs/outputs are manipulated for malicious purposes.
- 75% are worried about model theft.
- 73% are concerned about the use of AI-led social engineering.
- A further 72% are worried about provenance in the AI supply chain.
Machine identity security complexity is growing
The research also provided insights into which areas in cloud native infrastructure organizations have experienced security incidents. Machine identities like access tokens used with service accounts topped the list with 56%, but almost as many (53%) experienced incidents related to other machine identities, such as certificates.
Part of the reason these incidents occur with such regularity is the growing complexity of cloud native environments. This creates new challenges for security teams around managing and securing the machine identities that underpin access and authentication in cloud native environments:
- 74% of security leaders agree that humans are the weakest link in machine identity security. 83% of teams recognize that failing to secure machine identities at the workload level renders all other security obsolete.
- 69% say that delivering secure access between their cloud native and data center environments is a ‘nightmare to manage’, while 89% are experiencing challenges around managing and securing secrets at scale.
- 83% think having multiple service accounts also creates a lot of added complexity, but most (91%) agree that service accounts make it easier to ensure that policies are uniformly defined and enforced across cloud native environments.
