Check for publicly exposed cloud storage buckets

Publicly exposed cloud storage buckets represent one of the more consequential, commonly-exploited misconfigurations in modern web infrastructure, since these buckets frequently contain substantial volumes of data — user uploads, backups, internal documents — that were never intended for public access but become directly accessible due to overly permissive access configuration.

This category of vulnerability has been responsible for numerous significant, well-documented data breaches across many organizations, typically arising from cloud storage being configured with public read access, either through initial misconfiguration or through a later configuration change that inadvertently loosened access restrictions that were previously appropriately set.

The genuine severity here depends entirely on what data the exposed bucket actually contains — a bucket storing genuinely public assets like website images poses little risk if exposed, while a bucket containing user data, internal documents, or other sensitive content represents a genuinely severe exposure comparable in impact to the other high-severity exposed-file vulnerabilities discussed throughout this security work.

Identifying and correcting this risk requires genuinely auditing your actual cloud storage configuration against the principle of least privilege — access should be explicitly restricted to only what's genuinely necessary for legitimate application functionality, with any bucket containing sensitive content specifically verified to have no unintended public read or write access.