Cloud Security Fundamentals Flashcards

A user signs up for a web-based email service. They are only responsible for managing their own login credentials and the data within their emails. The provider handles all server maintenance, software updates, and infrastructure security. Which cloud service model does this scenario represent?

Answer: Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud delivery model where the provider hosts and manages a complete software application, making it available to customers over the internet. Web-based email is a classic example, as the user only interacts with the final software product without managing any underlying infrastructure.

According to the shared responsibility model for cloud security, which of the following is almost always the user's responsibility, regardless of the service model (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS)?

Answer: Securing and managing their own data and access credentials

In all major cloud service models, the customer (user) is responsible for protecting their own data, including classifying it and managing who has access. They are also responsible for managing their own user credentials, such as passwords and multi-factor authentication. The cloud provider is responsible for the security *of* the cloud, while the customer is responsible for security *in* the cloud.

A user uploads a folder of photos to a cloud storage service. To share a single photo with a friend, they right-click the entire folder and set its permissions to 'Public'. What is the MOST significant security risk of this action?

Answer: All photos in the folder are now potentially exposed to anyone on the internet.

Setting permissions at the folder level often applies those permissions to all items within it. Making a folder public exposes all of its contents, not just the single intended file, to anyone who can find the link. This type of misconfiguration is a leading cause of data breaches in the cloud.

Which of the following is a primary security advantage of using a major cloud service provider for data storage compared to storing files solely on a personal external hard drive?

Answer: It provides professional security management and geographic data redundancy.

Major cloud providers employ teams of security experts and operate highly secure, geographically dispersed data centers. This provides a level of data redundancy (protection against data loss from a single event like a fire or hardware failure) and professional security management that is difficult for an individual to achieve with a local storage device.

A small business subscribes to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider to host a virtual server for its website. A critical vulnerability is discovered in the server's operating system. According to the shared responsibility model, who is responsible for applying the security patch?

Answer: The small business (the customer) is responsible.

In an IaaS model, the cloud provider manages the physical infrastructure (data centers, networking, servers) and the virtualization layer. The customer, however, is responsible for securing everything they put on that infrastructure, which includes the guest operating system, applications, and their data. Therefore, patching the OS is the customer's responsibility.

A user synchronizes the 'Documents' folder from their laptop to a cloud storage service. Later, their laptop is infected with ransomware, which encrypts all the files in the 'Documents' folder. What is the MOST likely immediate outcome for the files in the cloud?

Answer: The encrypted versions of the files will be synchronized, overwriting the clean copies in the cloud.

Synchronization services work by mirroring the state of the local folder. When the ransomware encrypts the files on the laptop, the sync client sees these as 'changed' files and uploads the new, encrypted versions to the cloud, overwriting the previous good copies. While some cloud services offer version history or file recovery features, the default synchronization action is to replicate the changes.