What to Do After a Cloud Account Is Compromised

A compromised cloud identity can expose files, applications, infrastructure, and billing. Follow your incident-response plan and prioritize containment while preserving useful logs.

Use a trusted administrative session

Follow your organization's approved process to secure the identity provider and cloud console. Avoid using a device or session believed to be compromised.

Revoke suspicious access

Review active sessions, access keys, OAuth grants, service principals, API tokens, and recovery methods. Revoke unauthorized access and rotate exposed secrets in a controlled order.

Review audit logs

Preserve sign-in events, privilege changes, new resources, storage access, network changes, and unusual billing activity. Record the relevant time window and export logs before retention limits expire.

Contain affected resources

Coordinate with the cloud security team to isolate compromised workloads, restrict access, and protect backups without destroying evidence.

Check for persistence

Review new users, roles, keys, scheduled jobs, deployment pipelines, and configuration changes. Use approved incident-response procedures rather than making speculative changes.

Recover and learn

Restore from trusted sources, patch the root cause, monitor closely, and document lessons learned. Notify affected parties or authorities when required.

Related guides

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Important: General educational information, not legal or financial advice. Outcomes depend on the facts and applicable law; no recovery or security result is guaranteed.