Executive Summary
The H2 2025 Google Cloud Threat Horizons Report details the evolving landscape of cloud security threats. It highlights sophisticated tactics employed by threat actors, including advanced methods for data exfiltration, identity compromise, and supply chain attacks. The report emphasizes the critical need for robust identity and access management, proactive vulnerability management, and resilient backup solutions. Key trends include the targeting of backup infrastructure, sophisticated social engineering, and the misuse of trusted cloud services for malware delivery.
Key Threat Areas
- Foundational Security: Credential compromise and misconfiguration remain primary entry points for threat actors.
- Backup Infrastructure Targeting: Financially motivated groups are increasingly targeting backup systems, necessitating resilient recovery solutions.
- Social Engineering & MFA Bypass: Advanced actors use social engineering to steal credentials and bypass multi-factor authentication.
- Decoy Files & Supply Chain Risks: Threat actors use deceptive files hosted on cloud services and exploit vulnerabilities in software supply chains.
Mitigation Strategies
Google Cloud offers robust capabilities to counter these threats. Recommendations include fortifying identity with MFA and session management, enhancing endpoint and cloud workload threat detection, implementing granular segmentation and zero trust principles, and securing software development and supply chains. User awareness training and inbound file inspection are also crucial for defense.
About the Report
This report is informed by Google Cloud's Office of the CISO, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), Mandiant Consulting, and various Google Cloud intelligence, security, and product teams. It aims to provide decision-makers with strategic intelligence and actionable risk mitigations to improve cloud security.
For more information on Google Cloud security, visit Google Cloud Security.
