ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Question

Object storage services such as Amazon S3 or Azure Blob are typically accessed through Internet-facing REST APIs and are organized into buckets or containers governed by their own access policies. If those policies are misconfigured-such as granting public read or write permissions-every object in the bucket can become accessible to anyone on the Internet, causing large-scale data exposure. This type of misconfiguration is a well-known, object-storage-specific threat.

Block storage volumes, by contrast, are presented as private devices that must be explicitly attached to virtual machines within the cloud provider's network. They do not receive public endpoints and are controlled through separate volume-level or IAM permissions; hence, accidental Internet-wide exposure is far less likely. Their predominant risks instead include issues like residual data on improperly sanitized volumes or unmanaged snapshot proliferation.

Side-channel exploits and hypervisor memory scraping attack the shared compute layer, not storage services themselves. Therefore, the threat most specific to the object storage tier is accidental public exposure caused by insecure bucket or container access policies.