Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (FORCISAMAJPM1767748297)
The details regarding individual company incidents & reports gives you full view from every side.
Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis
Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis
- Timeline of Cisco's Vulnerability and lateral movement inside company's environment.
- Overview of affected data sets, including SSNs and PHI, and why they materially increase incident severity.
- How Rankiteo’s incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score.
- How this cyber incident impacts Cisco Rankiteo cyber scoring and cyber rating.
- Rankiteo’s MITRE ATT&CK correlation analysis for this incident, with associated confidence level.
Full Incident Analysis Transcript
In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Cisco breach identified under incident ID FORCISAMAJPM1767748297.
The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Cisco's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cisco, the number of followers: 7281720, the industry type: Software Development and the number of employees: 95370 employees
After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 480 and after the incident was 478 with a difference of -2 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.
In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Cisco and their customers.
On 05 March 2025, AWS Users disclosed Data Exposure issues under the banner "Toxic Cloud Trilogies: Publicly Exposed, Critically Vulnerable, and Highly Privileged Cloud Buckets".
Tenable’s report highlights serious risks facing cloud storage users, including publicly exposed, critically vulnerable, and highly privileged cloud buckets (termed 'toxic cloud trilogies').
The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting AWS S3 Buckets, GCP Cloud Storage and AWS Elastic Container Service, and exposing Sensitive data, including confidential and restricted information.
Formal response steps have not been shared publicly yet.
The case underscores how Ongoing (based on scans conducted between October 2024 and March 2025), teams are taking away lessons such as Organizations must prioritize secure cloud configurations, regularly audit cloud storage settings, and avoid storing sensitive data in publicly accessible or misconfigured buckets. AWS, GCP, and Azure users should enable identity-checking services and monitor for exposed secrets, and recommending next steps like Conduct regular audits of cloud storage configurations, Enable identity-checking services (e.g., AWS IAM) and Avoid storing sensitive data in user data or environment variables.
Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.
MITRE ATT&CK® Correlation Analysis
Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating publicly exposed, critically vulnerable, and highly privileged cloud instances and Compromise Accounts (T1586) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating highly privileged cloud buckets with sensitive data exposed. Under the Credential Access tactic, the analysis identified Unsecured Credentials: Credentials In Files (T1552.001) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating 54% of AWS ECS task definitions and 52% of Google CloudRun environment variables contained confidential information and Unsecured Credentials: Cloud Instance Metadata API (T1552.005) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating 3.5% of AWS EC2 instances holding secrets in user data fields. Under the Collection tactic, the analysis identified Data from Cloud Storage (T1530) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating aWS hosted 16.7% of its buckets with sensitive data, GCP 6.5%, Azure 3.2% and Data from Information Repositories (T1213) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating sensitive data leaks in AWS and GCP cloud buckets, including Elastic Container Service task definitions. Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Transfer Data to Cloud Account (T1537) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating potential cascade of exploitative activity by attackers accessing exposed secrets and Exfiltration Over C2 Channel (T1041) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating publicly exposed cloud buckets with critical vulnerabilities. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating overconfidence in cloud security measures despite misconfigurations and Modify Cloud Compute Infrastructure (T1578) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating misconfigured cloud storage buckets with highly privileged data. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.
Sources & References
- Cisco Rankiteo Cyber Incident Details: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/cisco/incident/FORCISAMAJPM1767748297
- Cisco CyberSecurity Rating page: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/cisco
- Cisco Rankiteo Cyber Incident Blog Article: https://blog.rankiteo.com/forcisamajpm1767748297-vulnerability-december-2024/
- Cisco CyberSecurity Score History: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/cisco/history
- Cisco CyberSecurity Incident Source: https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cloud-security-amazon-google-microsoft-tenable-report/751047/
- Rankiteo A.I CyberSecurity Rating methodology: https://www.rankiteo.com/Images/rankiteo_algo.pdf
- Rankiteo TPRM Scoring methodology: https://static.rankiteo.com/model/rankiteo_tprm_methodology.pdf