At a Glance
The rising cloud breaches in the UK expose how misconfigurations and weak IAM can create devastating vulnerabilities. BlackBox Hosting’s managed private cloud eliminates these risks with hardened baselines, continuous monitoring, no public control-plane exposure, and UK-based expert support. Gain resilient, compliant protection against ransomware, DDoS, and next-generation cyber threats.
Attacks on Cloud Services in the UK
The UK is experiencing an unprecedented rise in cloud attacks, which are getting more and more sophisticated by the day. Every major attack on cloud services, from retail to automotive giants, serves as a warning to your organisation to up its defence. Beyond conventional security measures, you also need to focus on cloud attack prevention and the type of privacy breaches that can potentially target your business.
If we observe the trend in the recent attacks carefully, we can see that attackers target cloud misconfigurations, exposed admin endpoints, and IAM weaknesses. Once they gain access, there’s no limit to the damage they can cause.
So how does your business avoid these mistakes and up its defence?
In this guide, we extract lessons from recent cloud breaches and discuss how you can implement proactive defence strategies to avoid a similar fate.
What Is a Cloud Attack and Why Should All UK Organisations Care?
In simple terms, a cloud attack is an attack on your cloud resources, including storage, applications, and infrastructure. Attackers usually exploit vulnerabilities in your cloud environment and access your systems, stealing data and causing service disruptions.
According to the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024, UK businesses have experienced 7.78 million cyber crimes of all types.
How Misconfiguration Becomes the Gateway to Mass Breaches
Cloud misconfigurations are still the leading cause of cloud breaches. Misconfigurations in the cloud start as simple mistakes, like disabled monitoring or unsecured APIs, which soon turn into blind spots in the modern development environment.
Here are some of the common misconfigurations that could be affecting your cloud security efforts:
Misconfigured Access
Developers or operations engineers working on a CI/CD pipeline might grant “admin/all” rights, instead of restrictive ones to applications and services. Attackers often exploit these over-privileged IAM roles and gain unauthorised access.
Storage Exposure
During testing, your team may make storage public and later forget to change it back to private. This exposes your storage and cloud control plane to the public domain.
Long-lived Credentials & Secrets Exposure
Static keys, unrotated secrets, and hidden credentials are often embedded in code, CI/CD pipelines, or public repositories and have been repeatedly used as gateways. Bad actors can use these codes to quickly gain unauthorised access to your information.
Exposed Network Ports
Attackers can gain easy access to your systems when you leave ports open or keep default settings.
Poor Network Segmentation
Improper network segmentation or firewall configuration can allow exploiters to move easily across your systems.
These issues aren’t complex to fix, but they’re often overlooked. If you don’t address them in time, cloud misconfigurations remain a looming threat, even if your organisation adopts modern cloud security tools.
Recent UK-Relevant Cloud Breach Case Studies and Lessons Learned
Here are the 3 major cloud attacks that shook the UK market in 2025.
1. Pearson PLC
In January 2025, attackers gained access to Pearson’s cloud assets and stole customer information, financials, support tickets, and source code in AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Salesforce CRM via an exposed GitLab personal access token.
Lesson Learned:
Make sure you don’t expose any tokens or secrets in public repositories and secure all cloud credentials in vaults.
2. Oracle Cloud
In March 2025, a threat actor claimed to have exploited a vulnerability in the Oracle Cloud login endpoint (related to SSO/LDAP) and removed ~6 million records affecting 140,000 tenant organisations.
Lesson Learned:
Even if it’s a major cloud platform, ensure you’re confident in its security posture and SSO monitoring capabilities.
3. Commvault
Commvault’s SaaS cloud applications hosted in Microsoft Azure environments were targeted by threat actors, who accessed client secrets in the cloud and gained entry into clients’ Microsoft 365 applications.
Lesson Learned:
Cloud-SaaS providers and their service secrets are high-value targets. With that in mind, you’ll need to continuously monitor and control delegated access, even through trusted cloud apps.
How Blackbox Hosting’s Fully Managed Private Cloud Bolsters Cloud Attack Prevention
The future of the cloud is hinged on its security. It’s predicted that by 2027, 17% of total cyberattacks will exploit Gen AI. While this concerns business globally, it also opens the scope to upgrade your cloud attack prevention strategies.
At BlackBox Hosting, we’re committed to securing your cloud environment with strong security measures to defend against the most sophisticated cloud attacks.
Here’s what you get from our managed private cloud:
- No public control plane exposure, keeping your core access from the open Internet
- Your environment is secure from day one with hardened baselines
- Continuous monitoring and alerts through roles, logs, and configuration across your cloud
- Support from a UK-based expert team that fully understands cloud identity, segmentation, and the latest threat models
Don’t wait for misconfigurations to make your business vulnerable. Our robust and optimised cloud infrastructure secures your business cloud environment and defends against ransomware, DDoS, phishing, or any other sophisticated cyber attack.
Call +44 (0)2037 407 840 to learn more about our managed private cloud and start a 30-day free hosting trial today.
