The Toxic Cloud Trilogy: Why Your Workloads Are a Ticking Time Bomb

Don’t let hidden cloud risks become tomorrow’s headline breach. The time to dismantle the toxic cloud trilogy is now. Here’s how Tenable Cloud Security can help.

In today’s cloud environments, individual misconfigurations or vulnerabilities are dangerous — but it’s their combinations that can lead to catastrophic breaches. The Tenable Cloud Security Risk Report 2025 reveals that nearly 29% of organizations still have at least one toxic cloud trilogy. While this is a reduction from last year, it’s still alarming. These high-risk clusters occur when a single cloud workload is:

• Publicly exposed to the internet
• Critically vulnerable due to unpatched CVEs
• Over-permissioned, with identity and access management (IAM) roles that allow lateral movement or privilege escalation

This trifecta has the potential to open up a highly exploitable attack path in the cloud.

Breaking down the toxic cloud trilogy

Let’s walk through a real-world example:

1. An attacker scans public IP ranges and finds an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance running a web server (public exposure)
2. They detect an unpatched remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in that server (critical vulnerability).
3. Upon exploitation, they gain access to an IAM role with iam:PassRole, ec2:RunInstances, or even *:* (excessive permission).
4. The result? Full environment compromise — which could enable actions including sensitive data exfiltration or infrastructure takeover.

This is not a rare edge case. Tenable’s research shows that toxic trilogies are still common, often born from the “get it working fast” mentality during development — and left unremediated in production.

Common challenges behind toxic workloads — and how Tenable Cloud Security can help

1. Critical vulnerabilities in running cloud workloads

Many organizations scan infrastructure-as-code but neglect active cloud workloads, missing CVEs that exist in live environments. In some cases, teams delay mitigation to wait for all patches to be available or lack urgency because they don’t have contex

[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.