Recent advances have given rise to the popularity and success of cloud computing. However, when outsourcing the data and business application to a third party causes the security and privacy issues to become a critical concern. Throughout the study at hand, the authors obtain a common goal to provide a comprehensive review of the existing security and privacy issues in cloud environments. We have identified five most representative security and privacy attributes (i.e., confidentiality, integrity, availability, accountability, and privacy-preservability). Beginning with these attributes, we present the relationships among them, the vulnerabilities that may be exploited by attackers, the threat models, as well as existing defense strategies in a cloud scenario. Future research directions are previously determined for each attribute.