Securing Kubernetes: Don’t Underestimate the Risk Posed by Misconfigurations

Deployed by more than 60% of organizations worldwide, Kubernetes (K8s) is the most widely adopted container-orchestration system in cloud computing. K8s clusters have emerged as the preferred solution for practitioners looking to orchestrate containerized applications effectively, so these clusters often contain various software, services, and resources, enabling users to deploy and scale applications with relative ease. 

To support a typical K8s environment operation, a cluster is often granted access to other environments such as artifact repositories, CI/CD environments, databases etc. Thus, K8s clusters can store customer data, financial records, intellectual property, access credentials, secrets, configurations, container images, infrastructure credentials, encryption keys, certificates, and network or service information. With so many clusters containing potentially valuable and lucrative data exposed to the internet, K8s provides a tempting target for threat actors. This risk escalates with the number of organizations that have misconfigurations that leave K8s clusters exposed and vulnerable to attacks.