⚡ TL;DR: Most cloud breaches are misconfigurations, not exploits: a public bucket, an open security group, an over-broad IAM role. CSPM continuously hunts these down, and the real win is preventive guardrails that stop them before they leak.

Contents

The bucket nobody meant to share

The principle: misconfiguration, not exploits

The picture: how CSPM actually works

The usual suspects: misconfigs that cause breaches

Catch one in the wild: flag a public bucket

Preventive vs detective: guardrails that fit

Common mistakes that cost hours (or records)

Takeaways

Where to go next

The bucket nobody meant to share

A team ships a feature on a Friday. To get unblocked, an engineer flips an S3 bucket to public read "just to test the CDN." The ticket closes, the weekend happens, and the line never gets reverted. Three weeks later a security researcher runs a scan across the internet, finds the open bucket, and downloads millions of customer records , names, emails, support transcripts. No password was cracked.…