According to a study made by security firm Cyble, about 900,000 Kubernetes are exposed to hackers because of misconfiguration errors. Thus, they could be exposed to involuntary malicious scans and can anytime evolve into simple data access points to cyber criminals.
Some companies do not engage professional staff to defend their IT assets and that’s proving as an enormous fortune to hackers, says research. As Kubernetes are administrative containerized applications, mis-configurations can prove fatal to these open source systems, says Cyble.
Usually, such kind of infrastructure is deployed in production environments in order to align physical and virtual machines into a uniform Application Programming Interface (API). If such environments are not configured as per the playbook, they can lead to vulnerabilities that could lead to data exfiltration and hacking attempts.
Surprisingly, Cyble mentioned in its security report that most Kubernetes were falling prey to data hacks due to the use of default settings. As hackers are familiar with such settings, they can easily take control of an environment and steal data or lead to downtimes.
Updating the Kubernetes with the latest software version, removing debugging tools from production environments and replacing default passwords might help avoid misconfiguration blunders.
Limiting the exposure of ports and permissions might also help in securing the Kubernetes to the core.
Note- Threat actors are using automated scanners to check for vulnerabilities in Kubernetes environments. And most of such vulnerable environments were found in the United States, Germany and Republic of China.
