No it was due to the officially-endorsed fiber optic cables sitting in plain sight and the fact that they do business with so many other parties.
I work with some intermediate vendors in this space (they have direct access to the credit bureau data), and their security mechanisms are of concern. I am under some very strict NDA constraints, but I can say that there are serious problems and I am not surprised that breaches occur with regular frequency.
You can barely trust your own in-house developers to get these things right. How can you possibly hope to trust many other additional parties to get it right simultaneously as well?
> I suppose the infamous Equifax breach was due to a secret fiber optic cable running out of their datacenter?
No, of course not. But when you're dealing with physical infrastructure you can actually touch, it's much clearer and more certain what you're dealing with.
I don't think that is as true as you make it sound. I have managed on-prem and cloud infrastructure and am much more confident that my cloud servers are secure because a whole lot of stuff is done by the provider who know a lot more than me between them.
Even on a really simple on-prem scenario, you have switches to configure, vlans to setup, hardware drivers, a gazillion updates to make all the time and a tonne of employees making it all very difficult. The fact I can see it physically doesn't realy help me that much.
For one, at a certain scale you shouldn't be running an inhouse DC solo, you can get away with it more in the cloud but at a certain ace again you want more manpower for review/auditing and brain/man power.
Most of what you described aren't actually principle attack vectors either. The primary vectors are the same between on premise and cloud. Misconfigured VPNs, stolen VPN credentials, poor network segmentation (Cloud absolutely does not fix this for you, you still need brain power and auditing to find accidental misconfigs).
I suppose the infamous Equifax breach was due to a secret fiber optic cable running out of their datacenter?