Category: Cloud

Niko Neugebauer wants to hang on to that data:

Data exfiltration is a technique that is also sometimes described as data theft or data extrusion, that describes the unauthorized extraction of data from the original source. This unauthorized extraction can be executed either manually or automatically by the malicious attacker.

As part of your Network Infrastructure, you might have tightened your security to make sure you have all the bells and whistles to lock down your Azure SQL Managed Instance to be accessed only by your application and not exposed to the Internet or any other traffic. However, this doesn’t stop a malicious admin from taking a backup or creating a linked server to another resource outside your enterprise subscription for extracting the data. This action would be data exfiltration. In a typical on-premises infrastructure, you can lock down network access completely to make sure that the data never leaves your network. However, in a cloud setup, there is a possibility that someone with elevated privileges can export data or perform some other malicious activity targeting their own resources outside your organization, compromising your enterprise data. Hence, it is very important to understand the different data exfiltration scenarios and make sure that you are taking the right steps to monitor for and prevent such activities.

Click through for a table which shows common exfiltration scenarios and things you can do to reduce the risk of exfiltration. With access, though, there’s always going to be a risk of exfiltration: even in a SCIF, you can get away with shoving records into your pants if you’re famous enough.