The Toxic Cloud Trilogy: Why Your Workloads Are a Ticking Time Bomb

The toxic cloud trilogy, a combination of public exposure, critical vulnerabilities, and over-permissioned identities, can lead to catastrophic breaches in cloud environments. According to the Tenable Cloud Security Risk Report 2025, nearly 29% of organizations still have at least one toxic cloud trilogy. This trifecta creates a highly exploitable attack path in the cloud, allowing attackers to gain access to sensitive data or take over infrastructure. A real-world example of a toxic cloud trilogy involves an attacker finding a publicly exposed AWS EC2 instance with an unpatched vulnerability and excessive IAM permissions. Tenable's research shows that these toxic trilogies are common due to the "get it working fast" mentality during development and lack of remediation in production. Tenable Cloud Security can help address common challenges behind toxic workloads, including critical vulnerabilities, public network exposure, excessive permissions, and fragmented tooling. The platform offers agentless scanning, integrated code-to-cloud visibility, exposure-aware prioritization, and risk scoring. Tenable Cloud Security also provides integrated cloud infrastructure and entitlement management capabilities, least privilege policy recommendations, and detection of trust policy misconfigurations. By dismantling the toxic cloud trilogy, security teams can eliminate toxic workload risk and prioritize what matters most using cross-domain context. Tenable's cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) capabilities offer continuous, contextualized security across the full stack to prevent breaches.