Cyber Brief: Cloud outage review, OTP bypass trends and UK resilience gaps

Today’s updates highlight the operational and strategic risks facing organisations as the year draws to a close. A major cloud provider is investigating service instability linked to identity components, attackers are deploying refined one time passcode bypass techniques and new UK resilience findings show persistent gaps in continuity and recovery preparedness across sectors.

Major cloud provider investigates service instability linked to identity layer

A leading cloud provider is investigating intermittent authentication and service availability issues that occurred across several regions during the last 24 hours. Early indications point to load imbalance within the identity and token issuance layer, which caused cascading delays across dependent services including compute workloads, storage interaction and API gateways. While the provider restored functionality quickly, the disruption affected organisations with tightly coupled integrations or no built in retry logic.
This incident highlights the broader challenge of cloud dependency. Even highly mature platforms experience instability, and when identity components are impacted, the downstream effects can be widespread. For organisations operating critical workloads, resilience depends on designing applications that assume intermittent failures, support graceful degradation and include fallbacks for authentication bottlenecks.

Why it matters
Outages within cloud identity services can disrupt operations even when core compute remains healthy. Organisations should validate retry logic, multi region failover options and incident detection workflows that account for partial, not total, service degradation.

Source
Cloud service disruption reports and industry analysis

Attackers refine OTP bypass methods targeting MFA protected accounts

Security teams have observed a rise in one time passcode bypass attempts using a combination of social engineering, reverse proxy tooling and session token replay. Unlike traditional MFA fatigue, these campaigns rely on capturing legitimate session data through cloned portals and replaying it before the user realises authentication has been intercepted. Attackers then pivot to administrative dashboards, cloud consoles and remote access gateways where session reuse is most valuable.
The notable change is the precision. Attackers are using low volume techniques with tailored prompts, reducing the visibility of unusual activity in monitoring systems. They also align attempts with typical working hours, mimicking legitimate login patterns. Once authenticated, threat actors often create additional access tokens or persistence mechanisms that allow ongoing access without repeated prompts.

Why it matters
MFA alone is no longer sufficient. Organisations should prioritise phishing resistant MFA methods, enforce token binding to devices and monitor for anomalous session creation. Rapid validation of unexpected login paths is essential.

Source
Threat intelligence and authentication security reporting

New UK resilience review highlights gaps in continuity and recovery discipline

A recently published UK resilience review has identified ongoing weaknesses in organisational preparedness for cyber incidents. Although detection capabilities have improved, many organisations continue to lack tested recovery plans, validated backups and structured continuity arrangements. The review found that a significant proportion of organisations have not conducted a full restore test within the past year, and others rely on informal recovery steps without detailed mapping of dependencies.
The findings emphasise that resilience is not only a technical issue but also an organisational one. In several incidents examined, the primary delays stemmed from unclear decision making, gaps in communication chains and limited understanding of which systems were truly mission critical. The review recommends renewed focus on cross functional exercises, improved documentation and board level ownership of resilience planning.

Why it matters
Resilience is measured by how quickly an organisation can recover, not just detect. Regular restore testing, clear prioritisation of critical services and defined leadership roles during incidents significantly reduce downtime and operational impact.

Source
UK cyber resilience assessments

Today’s Key Actions

1. Review cloud architecture for authentication retry logic and regional failover.
2. Strengthen MFA by adopting phishing resistant methods and enforcing token binding.
3. Monitor for unusual session behaviour and rapid token creation.
4. Conduct or schedule a full backup restore test and update continuity plans.
5. Reconfirm leadership responsibilities and cross team communication protocols.

Secarma Insight

Today’s developments reinforce that resilience is built on readiness, not optimism. Cloud dependency, identity threats and weak recovery planning continue to be the pressure points attackers exploit most. Organisations that invest in robust identity controls, realistic continuity testing and clear operational governance position themselves to navigate disruption with confidence.

Get in touch with us to prioritise your next steps and strengthen your security posture.