What is a misconfigured storage bucket and how do we avoid one?
It is cloud storage that is readable, or even writable, by more people than intended, often by anyone on the internet. Object storage services let you share a bucket or container publicly with a single setting or a link, which is useful for a website's images and dangerous for backups, exports, invoices or customer files. Many publicised data exposures were not hacks at all but files found by someone scanning for open buckets. Avoid it with a few habits: turn on the provider's account-wide block on public access unless a bucket truly needs to be public, and keep public content in separate, clearly named buckets; prefer time-limited signed links over public sharing; encrypt data and restrict who can change sharing settings; use the provider's configuration checks or a posture tool that flags public storage; and review sharing links in SaaS storage, such as links that work for anyone who has them. Check after every new project, because test buckets are a common culprit. A network sensor does not see bucket settings; that belongs to cloud configuration management.