"A malicious insider could leverage these weaknesses to grant themselves more access than normally allowed."
"There is little that can be done to mitigate the risk other than, possibly, limiting the blast radius by reducing the authentication scope and introducing robust security boundaries in between them."
"This could have the side effect of significantly increasing the cost, so it may not be a commercially viable option either."
"That is what makes the risk severe. You are trusting components that you cannot observe, constrain, or isolate without fundamentally redesigning your cloud posture. Most organizations log user activity but ignore what the platform does internally. That needs to change. You need to monitor your service agents like they're privileged employees. Build alerts around unexpected BigQuery queries, storage access, or session behavior. The attacker will look like the service agent, so that is where detection must focus."
Unmonitored platform service agents and internal cloud components can possess excessive privileges that attackers or malicious insiders can exploit to gain unauthorized access. Enterprise security tools and logging commonly focus on human user activity and often fail to observe or constrain platform behavior. Mitigation options include narrowing authentication scopes and introducing robust security boundaries to limit blast radius, but those measures can be costly and operationally complex. Effective defense requires treating service agents like privileged employees, implementing monitoring and alerts for anomalous queries, storage access, and session behavior, and redesigning cloud posture where necessary to enable observability and controls.
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