The pinnacle of safety advocacy at Datadog, a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform, has urged enterprises in Australia and the APAC area to speed up phasing out long-lived credentials for well-liked hyperscale cloud providers, warning that they continue to be a critical knowledge breach danger.
Talking with TechRepublic, Andrew Krug highlighted findings from Datadog’s State of Cloud Safety 2024 report, which recognized long-lived credentials as a persistent safety danger issue. Whereas credential administration practices are bettering, Krug famous they don’t seem to be advancing as shortly or successfully as wanted to mitigate dangers.
Lengthy-lived credentials are nonetheless an enormous menace to cloud safety
The report revealed that almost half (46%) of organisations utilizing AWS depend on IAM customers for human entry to cloud environments — a follow Datadog referred to as a type of long-lived credential. This was true even for organisations utilizing centralised identification administration to grant entry throughout a number of methods.
Furthermore, almost one in 4 relied solely on IAM customers with out implementing centralised federated authentication. In accordance with Datadog, this highlights a persistent challenge: whereas centralised identification administration is turning into extra frequent, unmanaged customers with long-lived credentials proceed to pose a major safety danger.
The prevalence of long-lived credentials spans all main cloud suppliers and infrequently contains outdated or unused entry keys. The report discovered that 62% of Google Cloud service accounts, 60% of AWS IAM customers, and 46% of Microsoft Entra ID purposes had entry keys that have been greater than a yr outdated.
Lengthy-lived credentials include a major danger of knowledge breaches
Lengthy-lived cloud credentials by no means expire and continuously get leaked in supply code, container photos, construct logs, and software artifacts, in accordance with Datadog. Previous analysis performed by the corporate has proven they’re the commonest reason for publicly documented cloud safety breaches.
SEE: The highest 5 cybersecurity developments for 2025
Krug stated there may be mature tooling available in the market to make sure secrets and techniques don’t find yourself in manufacturing environments, comparable to static code evaluation. Datadog’s report additionally notes the rise of IMDSv2 enforcement in AWS EC2 situations, an necessary safety mechanism to dam credential theft.
There are much less long-lived credentials, however change is just too sluggish
There have been strikes to mitigate the issue, comparable to AWS launching IAM Identification Centre, permitting organisations to centrally handle entry to AWS purposes. Whereas firms are within the course of of fixing to the service, Krug stated, “I simply don’t know that everybody considers this their highest precedence.”
“It undoubtedly ought to be, as a result of if we look on the final 10 years of knowledge breaches, the first theme is that long-lived entry key pairs have been the basis reason for these knowledge breaches mixed with overly permissive entry,” he defined. “If we remove one facet of that, we actually considerably scale back the chance for the enterprise.”
The long-lived credentials downside isn’t unique to APAC — it’s a world challenge
In accordance with Krug, APAC isn’t any totally different from the remainder of the world. With no regulation to manage the administration of long-lived credentials within the cloud in any explicit jurisdiction, firms worldwide use comparable approaches with comparable cloud suppliers, usually throughout a number of world jurisdictions.
What’s stopping the transfer away from long-lived credentials?
The trouble required to transition groups to single sign-on and momentary credentials has slowed the adoption of those practices. Krug stated the “raise and shift” concerned in migrating improvement workflows to single sign-on could be appreciable. That is partly as a result of mindset shift required and partly as a result of organisations should present satisfactory help and steerage to assist groups adapt.
Nevertheless, he famous that instruments like AWS Identification Centre, which has been accessible for 3 years, have made this transition extra possible. These instruments are designed to cut back developer friction by streamlining the authentication course of, minimising the necessity for repeated MFA sign-ins repeatedly, and guaranteeing that workflows stay environment friendly.
SEE: How AI is amplifying the dangers of knowledge within the cloud
“AWS Identification Centre is a good product and permits these very seamless consumer flows, however of us are nonetheless midstream in migrating to it,” Krug stated.
What must you do along with your long-lived credentials?
Datadog’s report warned that it’s unrealistic to count on that long-lived credentials could be securely managed. The seller recommends that firms undertake safe identities with fashionable authentication mechanisms, leverage short-lived credentials, and actively monitor modifications to APIs that attackers generally use.
“Organisations ought to leverage mechanisms that present time-bound, momentary credentials,” the report stated.
Workloads. For workloads, Datadog stated this finish could be achieved with IAM roles for EC2 situations or EKS Pod Identification in AWS, Managed Identities in Microsoft Azure, and repair accounts connected to workloads for Google Cloud if the organisation makes use of the main world hyperscalers.
People: For human customers, Datadog stated the best resolution is to centralise identification administration utilizing an answer like AWS IAM Identification Heart, Okta, or Microsoft Entra ID and keep away from utilizing particular person cloud customers for every worker, which it labelled “extremely inefficient and dangerous.”
