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Benefits of Ingesting Data from Amazon Inspector into Cisco Vulnerability Management

By Ahmadreza Edalat

Co-authored by Tejas Sheth, Sr. Security Specialist, Amazon Web Services – AISPL.

Risk-based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) represents a strategic approach to cyber security that focuses on… Read more on Cisco Blogs

Italian Data Protection Watchdog Accuses ChatGPT of Privacy Violations

By Newsroom
Italy's data protection authority (DPA) has notified ChatGPT-maker OpenAI of supposedly violating privacy laws in the region. "The available evidence pointed to the existence of breaches of the provisions contained in the E.U. GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]," the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (aka the Garante) said in a statement on Monday. It also said it

Google Settles $5 Billion Privacy Lawsuit Over Tracking Users in 'Incognito Mode'

By Newsroom
Google has agreed to settle a lawsuit filed in June 2020 that alleged that the company misled users by tracking their surfing activity who thought that their internet use remained private when using the “incognito” or “private” mode on web browsers. The class-action lawsuit sought at least $5 billion in damages. The settlement terms were not disclosed. The plaintiffs had

New AMBERSQUID Cryptojacking Operation Targets Uncommon AWS Services

By THN
A novel cloud-native cryptojacking operation has set its eyes on uncommon Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings such as AWS Amplify, AWS Fargate, and Amazon SageMaker to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. The malicious cyber activity has been codenamed AMBERSQUID by cloud and container security firm Sysdig. "The AMBERSQUID operation was able to exploit cloud services without triggering the AWS

Researchers Uncover AWS SSM Agent Misuse as a Covert Remote Access Trojan

By THN
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new post-exploitation technique in Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows the AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) to be run as a remote access trojan on Windows and Linux environments "The SSM agent, a legitimate tool used by admins to manage their instances, can be re-purposed by an attacker who has achieved high privilege access on an endpoint with

TeamTNT's Silentbob Botnet Infecting 196 Hosts in Cloud Attack Campaign

By THN
As many as 196 hosts have been infected as part of an aggressive cloud campaign mounted by the TeamTNT group called Silentbob. "The botnet run by TeamTNT has set its sights on Docker and Kubernetes environments, Redis servers, Postgres databases, Hadoop clusters, Tomcat and Nginx servers, Weave Scope, SSH, and Jupyter applications," Aqua security researchers Ofek Itach and Assaf Morag said in a

SCARLETEEL Cryptojacking Campaign Exploiting AWS Fargate in Ongoing Campaign

By THN
Cloud environments continue to be at the receiving end of an ongoing advanced attack campaign dubbed SCARLETEEL, with the threat actors now setting their sights on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fargate. "Cloud environments are still their primary target, but the tools and techniques used have adapted to bypass new security measures, along with a more resilient and stealthy command and control

Indonesian Cybercriminals Exploit AWS for Profitable Crypto Mining Operations

By Ravie Lakshmanan
A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations. Cloud security company's Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker GUI-vil (pronounced Goo-ee-vil). "The group displays a preference for Graphical

Cisco Joins the Launch of Amazon Security Lake

By Jessica Bair

Cisco supports the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework and is a launch partner of AWS Security Lake

The Cisco Secure Technical Alliance supports the open ecosystem and AWS is a valued technology alliance partner, with integrations across the Cisco Secure portfolio, including SecureX, Secure Firewall, Secure Cloud Analytics, Duo, Umbrella, Web Security Appliance, Secure Workload, Secure Endpoint, Identity Services Engine, and more.

Cisco Secure and AWS Security Lake

We are proud to be a launch partner of AWS Security Lake, which allows customers to build a security data lake from integrated cloud and on-premises data sources as well as from their private applications. With support for the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) standard, Security Lake reduces the complexity and costs for customers to make their security solutions data accessible to address a variety of security use cases such as threat detection, investigation, and incident response. Security Lake helps organizations aggregate, manage, and derive value from log and event data in the cloud and on-premises to give security teams greater visibility across their organizations.

With Security Lake, customers can use the security and analytics solutions of their choice to simply query that data in place or ingest the OCSF-compliant data to address further use cases. Security Lake helps customers optimize security log data retention by optimizing the partitioning of data to improve performance and reduce costs. Now, analysts and engineers can easily build and use a centralized security data lake to improve the protection of workloads, applications, and data.

Cisco Secure Firewall

Cisco Secure Firewall serves as an organization’s centralized source of security information. It uses advanced threat detection to flag and act on malicious ingress, egress, and east-west traffic while its logging capabilities store information on events, threats, and anomalies. By integrating Secure Firewall with AWS Security Lake, through Secure Firewall Management Center, organizations will be able to store firewall logs in a structured and scalable manner.

eNcore Client OCSF Implementation

The eNcore client provides a way to tap into message-oriented protocol to stream events and host profile information from the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. The eNcore client can request event and host profile data from a Management Center, and intrusion event data only from a managed device. The eNcore application initiates the data stream by submitting request messages, which specify the data to be sent, and then controls the message flow from the Management Center or managed device after streaming begins.

These messages are mapped to OCSF Network Activity events using a series of transformations embedded in the eNcore code base, acting as both author and mapper personas in the OCSF schema workflow. Once validated with an internal OCSF schema the messages are then written to two sources, first a local JSON formatted file in a configurable directory path, and second compressed parquet files partitioned by event hour in the S3 Amazon Security Lake source bucket. The S3 directories contain the formatted log are crawled hourly and the results are stored in an AWS Security Lake database. From there you can get a visual of the schema definitions extracted by the AWS Glue Crawler, identify fieldnames, data types, and other metadata associated with your network activity events. Event logs can also be queried using Amazon Athena to visualize log data.

Get Started

To utilize the eNcore client with AWS Security Lake, first go to the Cisco public GitHub repository for Firepower eNcore, OCSF branch.

Download and run the cloud formation script eNcoreCloudFormation.yaml.

The Cloud Formation script will prompt for additional fields needed in the creation process, they are as follows:

Cidr Block:  IP Address range for the provisioned client, defaults to the range shown below

Instance Type:  The ec2 instance size, defaults to t2.medium

KeyName  A pem key file that will permit access to the instance

AmazonSecurityLakeBucketForCiscoURI: The S3 location of your Data Lake S3 container.

FMC IP: IP or Domain Name of the Cisco Secure Firewall Mangement Portal

After the Cloud Formation setup is complete it can take anywhere from 3-5 minutes to provision resources in your environment, the cloud formation console provides a detailed view of all the resources generated from the cloud formation script as shown below.

Once the ec2 instance for the eNcore client is ready, we need to whitelist the client IP address in our Secure Firewall Server and generate a certificate file for secure endpoint communication.

In the Secure Firewall Dashboard, navigate to Search->eStreamer, to find the allow list of Client IP Addresses that are permitted to receive data, click Add and supply the Client IP Address that was provisioned for our ec2 instance.  You will also be asked to supply a password, click Save to create a secure certificate file for your new ec2 instance.

Download the Secure Certificate you just created, and copy it to the /encore directory in your ec2 instance.

Use CloudShell or SSH from your ec2 instance, navigate to the /encore directory and run the command bash encore.sh test

You will be prompted for the certificate password, once that is entered you should see a Successful Communication message as shown below.

Run the command bash encore.sh foreground

This will begin the data relay and ingestion process. We can then navigate to the S3 Amazon Security Lake bucket we configured earlier, to see OCSF compliant logs formatted in gzip parquet files in a time-based directory structure. Additionally, a local representation of logs is available under /encore/data/* that can be used to validate log file creation.

Amazon Security Lake then runs a crawler task every hour to parse and consume the logs files in the target s3 directory, after which we can view the results in Athena Query.

More information on how to configure and tune the encore eStreamer client can be found on our official website, this includes details on how filter certain event types to focus your data retention policy, and guidelines for performance and other detailed configuration settings. 

Participate in the public preview

You can participate in the AWS Security Lake public preview. For more information, please visit the Product Page and review the User Guide. 

re:Invent 

While you are at AWS re:Invent, go see a demo video of the Security Lake integrations in the Cisco Booth #2411, from November 29 to December 2, 2022, at the Cloud, Network and User Security with Duo demo station.

Learn more about Cisco and AWS on the Cisco Secure Technical Alliance website for AWS.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to Seyed Khadem-Djahaghi, who spend long hours working with the beta to develop this integration and is the primary for developer of eNore.


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Researchers Detail AppSync Cross-Tenant Vulnerability in Amazon Web Services

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has resolved a cross-tenant vulnerability in its platform that could be weaponized by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to resources. The issue relates to a confused deputy problem, a type of privilege escalation where a program that doesn't have permission to perform an action can coerce a more-privileged entity to perform the action. The shortcoming was reported

Cisco Secure Firewall on AWS: Build resilience at scale with stateful firewall clustering

By Anubhav Swami

Organizations embrace the public cloud for the agility, scalability, and reliability it offers when running applications. But just as organizations need these capabilities to ensure their applications operate where needed and as needed, they also require their security does the same. Organizations may introduce multiple individual firewalls into their AWS infrastructure to produce this outcome. In theory, this may be a good decision, but in practice—this could lead to asymmetric routing issues. Complex SNAT configuration can mitigate asymmetric routing issues, but this isn’t practical for sustaining public cloud operations. Organizations are looking out for their long-term cloud strategies by ruling out SNAT and are calling for a more reliable and scalable solution for connecting their applications and security for always-on protection.

To solve these challenges, Cisco created stateful firewall clustering with Secure Firewall in AWS.

 

Cisco Secure Firewall clustering overview

Firewall clustering for Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual provides a highly resilient and reliable architecture for securing your AWS cloud environment. This capability lets you group multiple Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual appliances together as a single logical device, known as a “cluster.”

A cluster provides all the conveniences of a single device (management and integration into a network) while taking advantage of the increased throughput and redundancy you would expect from deploying multiple devices individually. Cisco uses Cluster Control Link (CCL) for forwarding asymmetric traffic across devices in the cluster. Clusters can go up to 16 members, and we use VxLAN for CCL.

In this case, clustering has the following roles:

Figure 1: Cisco Secure Firewall Clustering Overview

The above diagram explains traffic flow between the client and the server with the insertion of the firewall cluster in the network. Below defines the roles of clustering and how packet flow interacts at each step.

 

Clustering roles and responsibilities 

Owner: The Owner is the node in the cluster that initially receives the connection.

    • The Owner maintains the TCP state and processes the packets. 
    • A connection has only one Owner. 
    • If the original Owner fails, the new node receives the packets, and the Director chooses a new Owner from the available nodes in the cluster.

Backup Owner: The node that stores TCP/UDP state information received from the Owner so that the connection can be seamlessly transferred to a new owner in case of failure.

Director: The Director is the node in the cluster that handles owner lookup requests from the Forwarder(s). 

    • When the Owner receives a new connection, it chooses a Director based on a hash of the source/destination IP address and ports. The Owner then sends a message to the Director to register the new connection. 
    • If packets arrive at any node other than the Owner, the node queries the Director. The Director then seeks out and defines the Owner node so that the Forwarder can redirect packets to the correct destination. 
    • A connection has only one Director. 
    • If a Director fails, the Owner chooses a new Director.

Forwarder: The Forwarder is a node in the cluster that redirects packets to the Owner. 

    • If a Forwarder receives a packet for a connection it does not own, it queries the Director to seek out the Owner 
    • Once the Owner is defined, the Forwarder establishes a flow, and redirects any future packets it receives for this connection to the defined Owner.

Fragment Owner: For fragmented packets, cluster nodes that receive a fragment determine a Fragment Owner using a hash of the fragment source IP address, destination IP address, and the packet ID. All fragments are then redirected to the Fragment Owner over Cluster Control Link.  

 

Integration with AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB)

Cisco brought support for AWS Gateway Load Balancer (Figure 2). This feature enables organizations to scale their firewall presence as needed to meet demand (see details here).

Figure 2: Cisco Secure Firewall and AWS Gateway Load Balancer integration

 

Cisco Secure Firewall clustering in AWS

Building off the previous figure, organizations can take advantage of the AWS Gateway Load Balancer with Secure Firewall’s clustering capability to evenly distribute traffic at the Secure Firewall cluster. This enables organizations to maximize the benefits of clustering capabilities including increased throughput and redundancy. Figure 3 shows how positioning a Secure Firewall cluster behind the AWS Gateway Load Balancer creates a resilient architecture. Let’s take a closer look at what is going on in the diagram.

Figure 3: Cisco Secure Firewall clustering in AWS

Figure 3 shows an Internet user looking to access a workload. Before the user can access the workload, the user’s traffic is routed to Firewall Node 2 for inspection. The traffic flow for this example includes:

User -> IGW -> GWLBe -> GWLB -> Secure Firewall (2) -> GLWB -> GWLBe -> Workload

In the event of failure, the AWS Gateway Load Balancer cuts off existing connections to the failed node, making the above solution non-stateful.

Recently, AWS announced a new feature for their load balancers known as Target Failover for Existing Flows. This feature enables forwarding of existing connections to another target in the event of failure.

Cisco is an early adaptor of this feature and has combined Target Failover for Existing Flows with Secure Firewall clustering capabilities to create the industry’s first stateful cluster in AWS.

aws
Figure 4: Cisco Secure Firewall clustering rehashing existing flow to a new node

Figure 4 shows a firewall failure event and how the AWS Gateway Load Balancer uses the Target Failover for Existing Flows feature to switch the traffic flow from Firewall Node 2 to Firewall Node 3. The traffic flow for this example includes:

User -> IGW -> GWLBe -> GWLB -> Secure Firewall (3) -> GLWB -> GWLBe -> Workload

 

Conclusion

Organizations need reliable and scalable security to protect always-on applications in their AWS cloud environment. With stateful firewall clustering capabilities from Cisco, organizations can protect their applications while maintaining cloud benefits such as agility, scalability, and reliability.

Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is available in the AWS marketplace, providing features like firewalling, application visibility & control, IPS, URL filtering, and malware defense. Cisco offers flexible options for firewall licensing, such as pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and bring-your-own-license (BYOL). To learn more about how Cisco Secure Firewall clustering capabilities can help protect your AWS applications, see our additional resources, check out our 30-day free trial, or speak to your Cisco sales representative.

 

Additional Resources 

Cisco Secure Firewall Clustering in the Cloud

Building a Scalable Security Architecture on AWS with Cisco Secure Firewall and AWS Gateway Load Balancer

Introducing AWS Gateway Load Balancer Target Failover for Existing Flows

Secure Firewall for Public Cloud webpage


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Over 1,800 Android and iOS Apps Found Leaking Hard-Coded AWS Credentials

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Researchers have identified 1,859 apps across Android and iOS containing hard-coded Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials, posing a major security risk. "Over three-quarters (77%) of the apps contained valid AWS access tokens allowing access to private AWS cloud services," Symantec's Threat Hunter team, a part of Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Interestingly, a

Cisco and AWS: Securing your resilience in a hybrid cloud world

By Justin Buchanan

We’ve all seen the headlines like “race to the cloud” and “cloud-first.” These articles and publications are true, more and more customers have adopted cloud strategies, but there is more to the story. In these customer conversations, cloud security and network security are often discussed in unison. Why is that?   

Customers desire freedom and choice when establishing resilience across every aspect of their business, and this requires both the ability to remain agile, and maintain control of their organization’s most sensitive data. Neither of these can be achieved with just the cloud, or private data center. Organizations are investing in hybrid-multicloud environments to ensure continuity amidst unpredictable threats and change. But these investments will fall short if they do not include security. 

The modern enterprise relies on the network more than ever before, and it looks a lot different than it did 10 years ago. According to our 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report, where 2,500 global IT leaders were interviewed across 13 countries, 82% said they have adopted hybrid cloud architectures, and 47% of organizations use between two and three public IaaS clouds1. As organizations have grown more dependent on the network, the more complex it has become, making firewall capabilities the most critical element of the hybrid-multicloud security strategy. And Cisco has a firewall capability for every strategy, protecting your most important assets no matter where you choose to deploy it.  

In May, Cisco brought offerings from Umbrella and Duo to the AWS Marketplace. Today at AWS Re:Inforce, Cisco Secure announced furthering its partnership with AWS to drive innovation with the goal to protect the integrity of your business. Validating our commitment to hybrid-multicloud security, Cisco has received the AWS Security Competency Partner designation for Network and Infrastructure Security. This designation was awarded through our demonstrated success with customer engagements and rigorous technical validations of Secure Firewall.  

Now demoing at AWS Re:Inforce: Cisco Secure Firewall as-a-service on AWS 

This week at AWS Re:Inforce, customers can stop by our booth to see our latest firewall innovation. Cisco Secure Firewall as-a-service on AWS builds on our existing portfolio, giving organizations greater flexibility and choice with a radically simplified SaaS offering. If organizations are truly to embrace security across the multi-environment IT, customers demand simplification without compromising security. With a SaaS-based form factor, management and deployment complexity is reduced. NetOps and SecOps teams will enjoy a simplified security architecture where provisioning of firewalls and control plane infrastructure are managed by Cisco. This will save your teams time by removing the need to rearchitect the network, freeing them to focus on protecting the integrity of your business. 

As organizations continue to move more of their day-to-day operations to the cloud, Cisco and AWS are committed to ensure that security is an integral part of their hybrid multi-cloud strategy. We all have seen the impact of security that is bolted on, or too complex. If we are truly to find that balance between agility and protection to ensure business continuity, we need to ensure the same protections we have in the private infrastructure are easily consumed no matter where your data may roam.  

Additional Resources 

Product page: Cisco Secure Firewall for Public Cloud 

Partner page: Cisco solutions on AWS 

Blog: Securing cloud is everyone’s responsibility 

Quick Start page: Cisco solutions on AWS 

Amazon Partner Network page: Cisco solutions on AWS  

2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report 

References 

1 Henderson, N. & Hanselman, E. (2022, May 25). 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report. 

S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by Cisco Systems. 

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/hybrid-cloud/2022-trends.html


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Unpatched Travis CI API Bug Exposes Thousands of Secret User Access Tokens

By Ravie Lakshmanan
An unpatched security issue in the Travis CI API has left tens of thousands of developers' user tokens exposed to potential attacks, effectively allowing threat actors to breach cloud infrastructures, make unauthorized code changes, and initiate supply chain attacks. "More than 770 million logs of free tier users are available, from which you can easily extract tokens, secrets, and other

Popular PyPI Package 'ctx' and PHP Library 'phpass' Hijacked to Steal AWS Keys

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Two trojanized Python and PHP packages have been uncovered in what's yet another instance of a software supply chain attack targeting the open source ecosystem. One of the packages in question is "ctx," a Python module available in the PyPi repository. The other involves "phpass," a PHP package that's been forked on GitHub to distribute a rogue update. "In both cases the attacker appears to have

Securing Your Migration to the Cloud

By Morgan Mann

Cisco Secure Access by Duo and Cisco Umbrella expands availability on AWS Marketplace

Cisco Secure powers security resilience enabling you to protect the integrity of your business amidst unpredictable threats and major change, such as migrating to the cloud. As a leader in cloud enablement, Cisco Secure is excited to announce the availability of our Security SaaS portfolio on AWS Marketplace. Now with the addition of Secure Access by Duo and Cisco Umbrella, you can take advantage of key marketplace differentiators, such as simple and integrated purchasing, the ability to use AWS cloud budget commitments for procurement (as part of the Enterprise Discount Program) and the flexibility of custom terms and pricing via private offers. This helps to ensure your organization is secure with the Cisco Secure portfolio.

The Duo and Umbrella solutions on AWS Marketplace protect remote and hybrid users who connect from various locations and devices and use cloud services to get work done. Both solutions deploy in minutes and integrate natively with Cisco SecureX to provide unified visibility and intuitive automation across your entire security portfolio in minutes. At the foundation of the solution is Cisco Talos threat intelligence, which is one of the largest commercial threat intelligence organizations in the world.

What is Cisco Umbrella?

As the first line of defense against threats on the internet wherever users go, Umbrella delivers visibility into all cloud services in use across your environment and blocks all risky applications. Two Umbrella versions are available on the AWS Marketplace – Umbrella DNS Security Essentials and Umbrella DNS Security Advantage.

What is Duo?

As the foundation for a zero-trust security model, Duo’s multi-factor authentication (MFA) allows you to verify the identity of all users and the health of their devices before connecting to the applications they need. Duo is easy to use, simple to administer, and provides complete endpoint visibility.   All three Duo editions are available on the AWS Marketplace – Duo MFA, Duo Access and Duo Beyond – enabling customers to select the right solution for their needs.

What is the benefit?

Delivered from the cloud for fast deployment, Umbrella and Duo allows you to uncover shadow IT, secure the use of sanctioned cloud applications (such as those running on AWS), and offer powerful protection against phishing and other threats. Today, customers can enjoy integrated discovery and can easily purchase Duo and Cisco Umbrella to begin recognizing value immediately.

Are you ready to accelerate your journey to the cloud? Visit Duo and Umbrella on the AWS Marketplace today.


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Amazon's Hotpatch for Log4j Flaw Found Vulnerable to Privilege Escalation Bug

By Ravie Lakshmanan
The "hotpatch" released by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in response to the Log4Shell vulnerabilities could be leveraged for container escape and privilege escalation, allowing an attacker to seize control of the underlying host. "Aside from containers, unprivileged processes can also exploit the patch to escalate privileges and gain root code execution," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Yuval

Cross-Regional Disaster Recovery with Elasticsearch

By The Hacker News
Unsurprisingly, here at Rewind, we've got a lot of data to protect (over 2 petabytes worth). One of the databases we use is called Elasticsearch (ES or Opensearch, as it is currently known in AWS). To put it simply, ES is a document database that facilitates lightning-fast search results. Speed is essential when customers are looking for a particular file or item that they need to restore using 

First Malware Targeting AWS Lambda Serverless Platform Discovered

By Ravie Lakshmanan
A first-of-its-kind malware targeting Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Lambda serverless computing platform has been discovered in the wild. Dubbed "Denonia" after the name of the domain it communicates with, "the malware uses newer address resolution techniques for command and control traffic to evade typical detection measures and virtual network access controls," Cado Labs researcher Matt Muir said

AWS User Management

By Robert Johnson

Introduction In order to keep your AWS environment secure while allowing your users to properly utilize resources, you must ensure that users are correctly created with proper permissions. Also, you must monitor your environment to ensure that unauthorized access does not occur and accounts are up to date. User Account Creation and Management AWS IAM […]

The post AWS User Management appeared first on Infosec Resources.


AWS User Management was first posted on September 30, 2020 at 1:24 pm.
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Cloud Security Is Simple, Absolutely Simple.

By Mark Nunnikhoven (Vice President, Cloud Research)

“Cloud security is simple, absolutely simple. Stop over complicating it.”

This is how I kicked off a presentation I gave at the CyberRisk Alliance, Cloud Security Summit on Apr 17 of this year. And I truly believe that cloud security is simple, but that does not mean easy. You need the right strategy.

As I am often asked about strategies for the cloud, and the complexities that come with it, I decided to share my recent talk with you all. Depending on your preference, you can either watch the video below or read the transcript of my talk that’s posted just below the video. I hope you find it useful and will enjoy it. And, as always, I’d love to hear from you, find me @marknca.

For those of you who prefer to read rather than watch a video, here’s the transcript of my talk:

Cloud security is simple, absolutely simple. Stop over complicating it.

Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute, what is this guy talking about? He is just off his rocker.”

Remember, simple doesn’t mean easy. I think we make things way more complicated than they need to be when it comes to securing the cloud, and this makes our lives a lot harder than they need to be. There’s some massive advantages when it comes to security in the cloud. Primarily, I think we can simplify our security approach because of three major reasons.

The first is integrated identity and access management. All three major cloud providers, AWS, Google and Microsoft offer fantastic identity, and access management systems. These are things that security, and [inaudible 00:00:48] professionals have been clamouring for, for decades.

We finally have this ability, we need to take advantage of it.

The second main area is the shared responsibility model. We’ll cover that more in a minute, but it’s an absolutely wonderful tool to understand your mental model, to realize where you need to focus your security efforts, and the third area that simplifies security for us is the universal application of APIs or application programming interfaces.

These give us as security professionals the ability to orchestrate. and automate a huge amount of the grunt work away. These three things add up to, uh, the ability for us to execute a very sophisticated, uh, or very difficult to pull off, uh, security practice, but one that ultimately is actually pretty simple in its approach.

It’s just all the details are hard and we’re going to use these three advantages to make those details simpler. So, let’s take a step back for a second and look at what our goal is.

What is the goal of cybersecurity? That’s not something you hear quite often as a question.

A lot of the time you’ll hear the definition of cybersecurity is, uh, about, uh, securing the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information or data. The CIA triad, different CIA, but I like to phrase this in a different way. I think the goal is much clearer, and the goal’s much simpler.

It is to make sure that whatever you’re building works as intended and only as intended. Now, you’ll realize you can’t accomplish this goal just as a security team. You need to work with your, uh, developers, you need to work with operations, you need to work with the business units, with the end users of your application as well.

This is a wonderful way of phrasing our goal, and realizing that we’re all in this together to make sure whatever you’re building works as intended, and only as intended.

Now, if we move forward, and we look at who are we up against, who’s preventing our stuff from working, uh, well?

You look at normally, you think of, uh, who’s attacking our systems? Who are the risks? Is it nation states? Is it maybe insider threats? While these are valid threats, they’re really overblown. You’re… don’t have to worry about nation state attacks.

If you’re a nation state, worry about it. If you’re not a nation state, you don’t have to worry about it because frankly, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. You can slow them down a little bit, but by definition, they’re going to get through your resources.

As far as insider attacks, this is an HR problem. Treat your people well. Um, check in with them, and have a strong information management policy in place, and you’re going to reduce this threat naturally. If you go hunting for people, you’re going to create the very threats that you’re looking at.

So, it brings us to the next set. What about cyber criminals? You know, we do have to worry about cyber criminals.

Cyber criminals are targeting systems simply because these systems are online, these are profit motivated criminals who are organized, and have a good set of tools, so we absolutely need to worry about them, but there’s a more insidious or more commonplace, maybe a simpler threat that we need to worry about, and that’s one of mistakes.

The vast majority of issues that happen around data breaches around security vulnerabilities in the cloud are mistake driven. In fact, to the point where I would not even worry about cyber criminals simply because all the work we’re going to do to focus on, uh, preventing mistakes.

And catching, and rectifying the stakes really, really quickly is going to uh, you a cover all the stuff that we would have done to block out cyber criminals as well, so mistakes are very common because people are using a lot more services in the cloud.

You have a lot more, um, parts and moving, uh, complexity in your deployment, um, and you’re going to make a mistake, which is why you need to put automated systems in place to make sure that those mistakes don’t happen, or if they do happen that they’re caught very, very quickly.

This applies to standard DevOps, the philosophies for building. It also applies to security very, very wonderfully, so this is the main thing we’re going to focus on.

So, if we look at that sum up together, we have our goal of making sure whatever we’re building works as intended, and only as intended, and our major issue here, the biggest risk to this is simple mistakes and misconfigurations.

Okay, so we’re not starting from ground zero here. We can learn from others, and the first place we’re going to learn is the shared responsibility model. The shared responsibility applies to all cloud service providers.

If you look on the left hand side of the slide here, you’ll see the traditional on premise model. We roughly have six areas where something has to be done roughly daily, whether it’s patching, maintenance, uh, just operational visibility, monitoring, that kind of thing, and in a traditional on premise environment, you’re responsible for all of it, whether it’s your team, or a team underneath your organization.

Somewhere within your tree, people are on the hook for doing stuff daily. Here when we move into an infrastructure, so getting a virtual machine from a cloud provider right off the bat, half of the responsibilities are pushed away.

That’s a huge, huge win.

And, as we move further and further to the right to more managed service, or staff level services, we have less and less daily responsibilities.

Now, of course, you always still have to verify that the cloud service provider’s doing what they, uh, say they’re doing, which is why certifications and compliance frameworks come into play, uh, but the bottom line is you’re doing less work, so you can focus on fewer areas.

Um, that is, or I should say not less work, but you’re doing, uh, less broad of a work.

So you can have that deeper focus, and of course, you always have to worry about service configuration. You are given knobs and dials to turn to lock things down. You should use them like things like encrypting, uh, all your data at rest.

Most of the time it’s an easy check box, but it’s up to you to check it ‘cause it’s your responsibility.

We also have the idea of an adoption framework, and this applies for Azure, for AWS and for Google, uh, and what they do is they help you map out your business processes.

This is important to security, because it gives you the understanding of where your data is, what’s important to the business, where does it lie, who needs to touch it, and access it and process it.

That also gives us the idea, uh, or the ability to identify the stakeholders, so that we know, uh, you know, who’s concerned about this data, who is, has an investment in this data, and finally it helps to, to deliver an action plan.

The output of all of these frameworks is to deliver an action plan to help you migrate into the cloud and help you to continuously evolve. Well, it’s also a phenomenal map for your security efforts.

You want to prioritize security, this is how you do it. You get it through the adoption framework, understanding what’s important to the business, and that lets you identify critical systems and areas for your security.

Again, we want to keep things simple, right? And, the third, uh, the o- other things we want to look at is the CIS foundations. They have them for AWS, Azure and GCP, um, and these provide a prescriptive guidance.

They’re really, um, a strong baseline, and a checklist of tasks that you can accomplish, um, or take on, on your, uh, take on, on your own, excuse me, uh, in order to, um, you know, basically cover off the really basics is encryption at rest on, um, you know, do I make sure that I don’t have, uh, things needlessly exposed to the internet, that type of thing.

Really fantastic reference point and a starting point for your security practice.

Again, with this idea of keeping things as simple as possible, so when it comes to looking at our security policy, we’ve used the frameworks, um, and the baseline to kind of set up a strong, uh, start to understand, uh, where the business is concerned, and to prioritize.

And, the first question we need to ask ourselves as security practitioners, what happened? If we, if something happens, and we ask what happened?

Do we have the ability to answer this question? So, that starts us off with logging and auditing. This needs to be in place before something happened. Let me just say that again, before something happened, you need [laughs] to be able to have this information in place.

Now, uh, this is really, uh, to ask these key questions of what happened in my account, and who, or what made that thing happen?

So, this starts in the cloud with some basic services. Uh, for AWS it’s cloud trail, for Azure, it’s monitor, and for Google Cloud it used to be called Stackdriver, it is now the Google Cloud operations suite, so these need to be enabled on at full volume.

Don’t worry, you can use some lifecycle rules on the data source to keep your costs low.

But, this gives you that layer, that basic auditing and logging layer, so that you can answer that question of what happened?

So, the next question you want to ask yourself or have the ability to answer is who’s there, right? Who’s doing what in my account? And, that comes down to identity.

We’ve already mentioned this is one of the key pillars of keeping security simple, and getting that highly effective security in your cloud.

[00:09:00] So here you’re answering the questions of who are you, and what are you allowed to do? This is where we get a very simple privilege, uh, or principle in security, which is the principle of least privilege.

You want to give an identity, so whether that’s a user, or a role, or a service, uh, only the privileges they, uh, require that are essential to perform the task that, uh, they are intended to do.

Okay?

So, basically if I need to write a file into a storage, um, folder or a bucket, I should only have the ability to write that file. I don’t need to read it, I don’t need to delete it, I just need to write to it, so only give me that ability.

Remember, that comes back to the other pillar of simple security here of, of key cloud security, is integrated identity.

This is where it really takes off, is that we start to assign very granular access permissions, and don’t worry, we’re going to use the APIs to automate all this stuff, so that it’s not a management headache, but the principle of these privilege is absolutely critical here.

The services you’re going to be using, amazingly, all three cloud providers got in line, and named them the same thing. It’s IAM, identity access management, whether that’s AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

Now, the next question we’re going to a- ask ourselves are the areas where we’re going to be looking at is really where should I be focusing security controls? Where should I be putting stuff in place?

Because up until now we’ve really talked about leveraging what’s available from the cloud service providers, and you absolutely should available, uh, maximize your usage of their, um, native and primitive, uh, structures primitive as far as base concepts, not as, um, refined.

They’re very advanced controls and, but there are times where you’re going to need to put in your own controls, and these are the areas you’re going to focus on, so you’re going to start with networking, right?

So, in your networking, you’re going to maximize the native structures that are available in the cloud that you’re in, so whether that’s a project structure in Google Cloud, whether that’s a service like transit gateway in AWS, um, and all of them have this idea of a VPC or virtual private cloud or virtual network that is a very strong boundary for you to use.

Remember, most of the time you’re not charged for the creation of those. You have limits in your accounts, but accounts are free, and you can keep adding more, uh, virtual networks. You may be saying, wait a minute, I’m trying to simplify things.

Actually, having multiple virtual networks or virtual private clouds ends up being far simpler because each of them has a task. You go, this application runs in this virtual private cloud, not a big shared one in this specific VPC, and that gives you this wonderfully strong security boundaries, and a very simple way of looking at one VPC, one action, very much the Unix philosophy in play.

Key here though is understanding that while all of the security controls in place for your service provider, um, give you, so, you know, whether it’s VPCs, routing tables, um, uh, access control lists, security groups, all the SDN features that they’ve got in place.

These really help you figure out whether service A or system A is allowed to talk to B, but they don’t tell you what they’re saying.

And, that’s where additional controls called an IPS, or intrusion prevention system come into play, and you may want to look at getting a third party control in to do that, because none of the th- big three cloud providers offer an IPS at this point.

[00:12:00] But that gives you the ability to not just say, “Hey, you’re allowed to talk to each other.” But, to monitor that conversation, to ensure that there’s not malicious code being passed back and forth between systems that nobody’s trying a denial of service attack.

A whole bunch of extra things on there have, so that’s where IPS comes into play in your network defense. Now, we look at compute, right?

We can have compute in various forms, whether that’s in serverless functions, whether that’s in containers, manage containers, whether that’s in traditional virtual machines, but all the principles are the same.

You want to understand where the shared responsibility line is, how much is on your plate, how much is on the CSPs?

You want to understand that you need to harden the EOS, or the service, or both in some cases, make sure that, that’s locked down, so have administrator passwords. Very, very complicated.

Don’t log into these systems, uh, you know, because you want to be fixing things upstream. You want to be fixing things in the build pipeline, not logging into these systems directly, and that’s a huge thing for, uh, systems people to get over, but it’s absolutely essential for security, and you know what?

It’s going to take a while, but there’s some tricks there you can follow with me. You can see, uh, on the slides, uh, at Mark, that is my social everywhere, uh, happy to walk you through the next steps.

This idea of this presentation’s really just the simple basics to start with, to give you that overview of where to focus your time, and, dispel that myth that cloud security is complicating things.

It is a huge path is simplicity, which is a massive lens, or for security.

So, the last area you want to focus here is in data and storage. Whether this is databases, whether this is big blob storage, or, uh, buckets in AWS, it doesn’t really matter the principles, again, all the same.

You want to encrypt your data at rest using the native cloud provided, uh, cloud service provider, uh, features functionality, because most of the time it’s just give it a key address, and give it a checkbox, and you’re good to go.

It’s never been easier to encrypt things, and there is no excuse for it and none of the providers charge extra for, uh, encryption, which is amazing, and you absolutely want to be taking advantage of that, and you want to be as granular as possible with your IAM, uh, and as reasonable, okay?

So, there’s a line here, and a lot of the data stores that are native to the cloud service providers, you can go right down to the data cell level and say, Mark has access, or Mark doesn’t have access to this cell.

That can be highly effective, and maybe right for your use case. It might be too much as well.

But, the nice thing is that you have that option. It’s integrated, it’s pretty straightforward to implement, and then, uh, when we look here, uh, sorry. and then, finally you want to be looking at lifecycle strategies to keep your costs under control.

Um, data really spins out of control when you don’t have to worry about capacity. All of the cloud service providers have some fantastic automations in place.

Basically, just giving you, uh, very simple rules to say, “Okay, after 90 days, move this over to cheaper storage. After 180 days, you know, get rid of it completely, or put it in cold storage.”

Take advantage of those or your bill’s going to spiral out of control, and, and that relates to availability ‘cause uh, uh, and reliability, ‘cause the more you’re spending on that kind of stuff, the less you have to spend on other areas like security and operational efficiency.

So, that brings us to our next big security question. Is this working?

[00:15:00] How do you know if any of this stuff is working? Well, you want to talk about the concept of traceability. Traceability is a, you know, somewhat formal definition, but for me it really comes down to where did this come from, who can access it, and when did they access it?

That ties very closely with the concept of observability. Basically, the ability to look at, uh, closed systems and to infer what’s going on inside based on what’s coming into that system, and what’s leaving that system, really what’s going on.

There’s some great tools here from the service providers. Again, you want to look at, uh, Amazon CloudWatch, uh, Azure Monitor and the Google Cloud operations, uh, suite. Um, and here this leads us to the key, okay?

This is the key to simplifying everything, and I know we’ve covered a ton in this presentation, but I really want you to take a good look at this slide, and again, hit me up, uh, @marknca, happy to answer any questions with, questions afterwards as well here, um, that this will really, really make this simple, and this will really take your security practice to the next level.

If the idea of something happened in your, cloud system, right? In your deployment, there’s a trigger, and then, it either is generating an event or a log.

If you go the bottom row here, you’ve got a log, which you can then react to in a function to deliver some sort of result. That’s the slow-lane on the bottom.

We’re talking minutes here. You also have the top lane where your trigger fires off an event, and then, you react to that with a function, and then, you get a result in the fast lane.

These things happen in seconds, sub-second time. You start to build out your security practice based on this model.

You start automating more and more in these functions, whether it’s, uh, Lambda, whether it’s Cloud Functions, whether it’s Azure Functions, it doesn’t matter.

The CSPs all offer the same core functionality here. This is the critical, critical success metric, is that when you start reacting in the fast lane automatically to things, so if you see that a security event is triggered from like your malware, uh, on your, uh, virtual machine, you can lock that off, and have a new one spin up automatically.

Um, if you’re looking for compliance stuff, the slow lane is the place to go, because it takes minutes.

Reactions happen up top, more, um, stately or more sedate things, so somebody logging into a system is both up top and down low, so up top, if you logged into a VPC or into, um, an instance, or a virtual machine, you’d have a trigger fire off and maybe ask me immediately, “Mark, did you log into the system? Uh, ‘cause you’re, you know, you’re not supposed to be.”

But then I’d respond and say, “Yeah, I, I did log in.” So, immediately you don’t have to respond. It’s not an incident response scenario, but on the bottom track, maybe you’re tracking how many times I’ve logged in.

And after the three or fourth time maybe someone comes by, and has a chat with me, and says, “Hey, do you keep logging into these systems? Can’t you fix it upstream in the deployment, uh, and build a pipeline ‘cause that’s where we need to be moving?”

So, you’ll find this balance, and this concept, I just wanted to get into your heads right now of automating your security practice. If you have a checklist, it should be sitting in a model like this, because it’ll help you, uh, reduce your workload, right?

The idea is to get as much automated possible, and keep things in very clear, and simple boundaries, and what’s more simple than having every security action listed as an automated function, uh, sitting in a code repository somewhere?

[00:18:00] Fantastic approach to modern security practice in the cloud. Very simple, very clear. Yes, difficult to implement. It can be, but it’s an awesome, simple mental model to keep in your head that everything gets automated as a function based on a trigger somewhere.

So, what are the keys to success? What are the keys to keeping this cloud security thing simple? And, hopefully you’ve realized the difference between a simple mental model, and the challenges, uh, in, uh, implementation.

It can be difficult. It’s not easy to implement, but the mental model needs to be kept simple, right? Keep things in their own VPCs, and their own accounts, automate everything. Very, very simple approach. Everything fits into this s- into this structure, so the keys here are remembering the goal.

Make sure that cybersecurity, uh, is making sure that whatever you build works as intended and only as intended. It’s understanding the shared responsibility model, and it’s really looking at, uh, having a plan through cloud adoption frameworks, how to build well, which is a, uh, a concept called the Well-Architected Framework.

It’s specific to AWS, but it’s generic, um, its principles, it can be applied everywhere. We didn’t cover it here, but I’ll put the links, um, in the materials for you, uh, as well as remembering systems over people, right?

Adding the right controls at the right time, uh, and then, finally observing and react. Be vigilant, practice. You’re not going to get this right out of the gates, uh, perfect.

You’re going to have to refine, iterate, and then it’s extremely cloud friendly. That is the cloud model is, get it out there, iterate quickly, but putting the structures in place, you’re not going to make sure that you’re not doing that in an insecure manner.

Thank you very much, uh, here’s a couple of links that’ll help you out before we take some Q&A here, um, trendmicro.com/cloud will get you to the products to learn more. We’re also doing this really cool streaming.

Uh, I host a show called Let’s Talk Cloud. Um, we uh, interview experts, uh, and have a great conversation around, um, what they’re talking about, uh, in the cloud, what they’re working on, and not just around security, but just in building in general.

You can hit that up at trendtalks.fyi. Um, and again, hit me up on social @marknca.

So, we have a couple of questions to kick this off, and you can put more questions in the webinar here, and they will send them along, or answer them in kind if they can.

Um, and that’s really what these are about, is the interaction is getting that, um, to and from. So, the first question that I wanted to tackle is an interesting one, and it’s really that systems over people.

Um, you heard me mention it in the, uh, in the end and the question is really what does that mean systems over people? Isn’t security really about people’s expertise?

And, yes and no, so if you are a SOC analyst, if you are working in a security, uh, role right now, I am really confident saying that 80%, 90% of what you do right now could be delegated out to a system.

So, if you were looking at log lines, and stuff that should be done by systems and bubble up, just the goal for you to investigate to do what people are good at in systems are bad at, so systems mean, uh, you know, putting in, uh, to build pipeline, putting in container scanning in the build pipeline, so that you have to manually scan stuff, right to get rid of the basics. Is that a pen test? 100% no.

Um, but it gets rid of that, hey, you didn’t upgrade to, um, you know, this version of this library.

[00:21:00] That’s all automated, and those, the more systems you get in place, the more you as a security professional, or your security team will be able to focus on where they can really deliver value and frankly, where it’s more interesting work, so that’s what systems over people mean, is basically automate as much as you can to get people doing what people are really good at, and to make sure that the systems catch what we make as mistakes all the time.

If you accidentally try to push an old build out, you know that systems should stop that, if you push a build that hasn’t been checked by that container scanning or by, um, you know, it doesn’t have the appropriate security policy in place.

Systems should catch all that humans shouldn’t have to worry about it at all. That’s systems over processing. You saw that on the, uh, keys to success slide here. I’ll just pull it up. Um, you know, is that, that’s absolutely key.

Another question that we had, uh, was what we didn’t get into here, which was around the Well-Architected Framework. Now, this is a document that was published by AWS, uh, a number of years back, and they’ve kept it going.

They’ve evolved it and essentially it has five pillars. Um, performance, efficiency, uh, op- reliability, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence. Hey, I’ve got all five.

Um, and really [laughs] what that is, is it’s about how to take advantage of these cloud tools.

Now, AWS publishes it, but honestly it applies to Azure, it applies to Google Cloud as well. It’s not service specific. It teaches you how to build in the cloud, and obviously security is one of those big pillars, but it’s… so talking about teaching you how to make those trade offs, how to build an innovation flywheel, so that you have an idea, test it, uh, get the feedback from it, and move forward.

Um, and that’s really, really key. Again, now you should be reading that even if you are an Azure, or GCP customer or, uh, that’s where you’re putting your most of your stuff, because it’s really about the principles, and everything we do, and encourage people to build well, it means that there’s less security issues, right?

Especially we know that the number one problem is mistakes.

That leads to the last question we have here, which is about that, how can I say that cyber criminals, you don’t need to worry about them.

You need to worry about mistakes? That’s a good question. It’s valid, and, um, Trend Micro does a huge amount of research around cyber criminals. I do a whole huge amount of research around cyber criminals.

Uh, my training, by training, and by professional experience. I’m a forensic investigator. This is what I do is take down cyber crimes. Um, but I think mistakes are the number one thing that we deal with in the cloud simply because of the underlying complexity.

I know it’s ironic, and to talk about simplicity, to talk about complexity, but the idea is, um, is that you look at all the major breaches, especially around s3 buckets, those are all m- based on mistake.

There’ve been billions, and billions, and billions of records, and, uh, millions of dollars of damage exposed because of simple mistakes, and that is far more common, uh, than cyber criminals.

And yes, cyber crimes you have [inaudible 00:23:32] worry. You have to worry about them, but everything you’re going to do to fix mistakes, and to put systems in place to stop those mistakes from happening is also going to be for your pr- uh, protection up against cyber criminals, and honestly, if you’re the guy who runs around your organization’s screaming about cyber criminals all the time, you’re far less credible than if you’re saying, “Hey, I want to make sure that we build really, really well, and don’t make mistakes.”

Thank you for taking the time. My name’s Mark Nunnikhoven. I’m the vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro. I’m also an AWS community hero, and I love this stuff. Hit me up on social @marknca. Happy to chat more.

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Automatic Visibility And Immediate Security with Trend Micro + AWS Control Tower

By Trend Micro

Things fail. It happens. A core principle of building well in the AWS Cloud is reliability. Dr. Vogels said it best, “How can you reduce the impact of failure on your customers?” He uses the term “blast radius” to describe this principle.

One of the key methods for reducing blast radius is the AWS account itself. Accounts are free and provide a strong barrier between resources, and thus, failures or other issues. This type of protection and peace of mind helps teams innovate by reducing the risk of running into another team’s work. The challenge is managing all of these accounts in a reasonable manner. You need to strike a balance between providing security guardrails for teams while also ensuring that each team gets access to the resources they need.

AWS Services & Features

There are a number of AWS services and features that help address this need. AWS Organizations, AWS Firewall Manager, IAM Roles, tagging, AWS Resource Access Manager, AWS Control Tower, and more, which all play a role in helping your team manage multiple accounts.

For this post, we’ll look at AWS Control Tower a little closer. AWS Control Tower was made generally available at AWS re:Inforce. The service provides an easy way to setup and govern AWS accounts in your environment. You can configure strong defaults for all new accounts, pre-populate IAM Roles, and more. Essentially, AWS Control Tower makes sure that any new account starts off on the right foot.

For more on the service, check out this excellent talk from the launch.

Partner Integrations

With almost a year under its belt, AWS Control Tower is now expanding to provide partner integrations. Now, in addition to setting up AWS services and features, you can pre-config supported APN solutions as well. Trend Micro is among the first partners to support this integration by providing the ability to add Trend Micro Cloud One™Workload Security and Trend Micro Cloud One™Conformity to your Control Tower account factory. Once configured, any new account that is created via the factory will automatically be configured in your Trend Micro Cloud One account.

Integration Advantage

This integration not only reduces the friction in getting these key security tools setup, it also provides immediate visibility into your environment. Workload Security will now be able show you any Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon ECS hosts within your accounts. You’ll still need to install and apply a policy to the Workload Security agent to protect these instances, but this initial visibility provides a map for your teams, reducing the time to protection. Conformity will start generating information within minutes. This information from Conformity will allow your teams to get a quick handle on their security posture and more with fast and ongoing security and compliance checks.

Integrating this from the beginning of every new account will allow each team to track their progress against a huge set of recommended practices across all five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.

What’s Next?

One of the biggest challenges in cloud security is integrating it early in the development process. We know that the earlier security is factored into your builds, the better the result. You can’t get much earlier than the initial creation on an account. That’s why this new integration with AWS Control Tower is so exciting. Having security in every account within your organization from day zero provides much needed visibility and a fantastic head start.

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Trend Micro Integrates with Amazon AppFlow

By Trend Micro

The acceleration of in-house development enabled by public cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform adoption in the last few years has given us new levels of visibility and access to data. Putting all of that data together to generate insights and action, however, can substitute one challenge for another.

Proprietary protocols, inconsistent fields and formatting combined with interoperability and connectivity hurdles can turn the process of answering simple questions into a major undertaking. When this undertaking is a recurrent requirement then that effort can seem overwhelming.

Nowhere is this more evident than in security teams, where writing code to integrate technologies is rarely a core competency and almost never a core project, but when a compliance or security event requires explanation, finding and making sense of that data is necessary.

Amazon is changing that with the release of AppFlow. Trend Micro Cloud One is a launch partner with this new service, enabling simple data retrieval from your Cloud One dashboard to be fed into AWS services as needed.

Amazon AppFlow is an application integration service that enables you to securely transfer data between SaaS applications and AWS services in just a few clicks. With AppFlow, you can data flows between supported SaaS applications, including Trend Micro, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Redshift, and run flows on a schedule, in response to a business event, or on demand. Data transformation capabilities, such as data masking, validation, and filtering, empower you to enrich your data as part of the flow itself without the need for post-transfer manipulation. AppFlow keeps data secure in transit and at rest with the flexibility to bring your own encryption keys.

Audit automation

Any regularly scheduled export or query of Cloud One requires data manipulation before an audit can be performed.

You may be responsible for weekly or monthly reports on the state of your security agents. To create this report today, you’ve written a script to automate the data analysis process. However, any change to the input or output requires new code to be written for your script, and you have to find somewhere to actually run the script for it to work.

As part of a compliance team, this isn’t something you really have time for and may not be your area of expertise, so it takes significant effort to create the required audit report.

Using Amazon AppFlow, you can create a private data flow between RedShift, for example, and your Cloud One environment to automatically and regularly retrieve data describing security policies into an easy to digest format that can be stored for future review. Data flows can also be scheduled so regular reports can be produced without recurring user input.

This process also improves integrity and reduces overall effort by having reports always available, rather than needing to develop them in response to a request.

This eliminates the need for custom code and the subsequent frustration from trying to automate this regularly occurring task.

Developer Enablement

Developers don’t typically have direct access to security management consoles or APIs for Cloud One or Deep Security as a Service. However, they may need to retrieve data from security agents or check the state of agents that need remediation. This requires someone from the security team to pull data for the developer each time this situation arises.

While we encourage and enable DevOps cultures working closely with security teams to automate and deploy securely, no one likes unnecessary steps in their workflow. And having to wait on the security team to export data is adding a roadblock to the development team.

Fortunately, Amazon AppFlow solves this issue as well. By setting up a flow between Deep Security as a Service and Amazon S3, the security team can enable developers to easily access the necessary information related to security agents on demand.

This provides direct access to the needed data without expanding access controls for critical security systems.

Security Remediation

Security teams focus on identifying and remediating security alerts across all their tools and multiple SaaS applications. This often leads to collaborating with other teams across the organization on application-specific issues that must be resolved. Each system and internal team has different requirements and they all take time and attention to ensure everything is running smoothly and securely.

At Trend Micro, we are security people too. We understand the need to quickly and reliably scale infrastructure without compromising its security integrity. We also know that this ideal state is often hindered by the disparate nature of the solutions on which we rely.

Integrating Amazon AppFlow with your Cloud One – Workload Security solution allows you to obtain the security status from each agent and deliver them to the relevant development or cloud team. Data from all machines and instances can be sent on demand to the Amazon S3 bucket you indicate. As an added bonus, Amazon S3 can trigger a Lambda to automate how the data is processed, so what is in the storage bucket can be immediately useful. And all of this data is secured in transit and at rest by default, so you don’t have to worry about an additional layer of security controls to maintain.

Easy and secure remediation that doesn’t slow anyone down is the goal we’re collectively working toward.

It is always our goal to help your business securely move to and operate in the cloud. Our solutions are designed to enable security teams to seamlessly integrate with a DevOps environment, removing the “roadblock” of security.

As always, we’re excited to be part of this new Amazon service, and we believe our customers can see immediate value by leveraging Amazon AppFlow with their existing Trend Micro cloud solutions.

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The AWS Service to Focus On – Amazon EC2

By Trend Micro
cloud services

If we run a contest for Mr. Popular of Amazon Web Services (AWS), without a doubt Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has ‘winner’ written all over it. However, what’s popular is not always what is critical for your business to focus on. There is popularity and then there is dependability. Let’s acknowledge how reliant we are on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) as AWS infrastructure led-organizations.

We reflected upon our in-house findings for the AWS ‘Security’ pillar in our last blog, Four Reasons Your Cloud Security is Keeping You Up at Night, explicitly leaving out over caffeination and excessive screen time!

Drilling further down to the most affected AWS Services, Amazon EC2 related issues topped the list with 32% of all issues. Whereas Mr. Popular – Amazon S3 contributed to 12% of all issues. While cloud providers, like AWS, offer a secure infrastructure and best practices, many customers are unaware of their role in the shared responsibility model. The results showing the number of issues impacting Amazon EC2 customers demonstrates the security gap that can happen when the customer part of the shared responsibility model is not well understood.

While these AWS services and infrastructure are secure, customers also have a responsibility to secure their data and to configure environments according to AWS best practices. So how do we ensure that we keep our focus on this crucial service and ensure the flexibility, scalability, and security of a growing infrastructure?

Introducing Rules

If you thought you were done with rules after passing high school and moving out of your parent’s house, you would have soon realized that you were living a dream. Rules seem to be everywhere! Rules are important, they keep us safe and secure. While some may still say ‘rules are made to be broken’, you will go into a slump if your cloud infrastructure breaks the rules of the industry and gets exposed to security vulnerabilities.

It is great if you are already following the Best Practices for Amazon EC2, but if not, how do you monitor the performance of your services day in and day out to ensure their adherence to these best practices? How can you track if all your services and resources are running as per the recommended standards?

We’re here to help with that. Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity ‘Rules’ provide you with that visibility for some of the most critical services like Amazon EC2.

What is the Rule?

A ‘Rule’ is the definition of the best practice used as a basis for an assessment that is run by Conformity on a particular piece of your Cloud infrastructure. When a rule is run against the infrastructure (resources) associated with your AWS account, the result of the scan is referred to as a Check. For example, an Amazon EC2 may have 60 Rules (Checks) scanning for various risks/vulnerabilities. Checks are either a SUCCESS or a FAILURE.

Conformity has about 540 Rules and 60 of them are for monitoring your Amazon EC2 services best practices. Conformity Bot scans your cloud accounts for these Rules and presents you with the ‘Checks’ to prioritize and remediate the issues keeping your services healthy and prevent security breaches.

Amazon EC2 Best Practices and Rules

Here are just a few examples of how Conformity Rules have got you covered for some of the most critical Amazon EC2 best practices:

  1. To ensure Security, ensure IAM users and roles are used and management policies are established for access policies.
  2. For managing Storage, keep EBS volumes separate for operating systems and data, and check that the Amazon EC2 instances provisioned outside of the AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) have Termination Protection safety feature enabled to protect your instances from being accidentally terminated.
  3. For efficient Resource Management, utilize custom tags to track and identify resources, and keep on top of your stated Amazon EC2 limits.
  4. For full confident Backup and Recovery, regularly test the process of recovering instances and EBS volumes should they fail, and create and use approved AMIs for easier and consistent future instance deployment.

See how Trend Micro can support your part of the shared responsibility model for cloud security: https://www.trendmicro.com/cloudconformity.

Stay Safe!

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Smart Check Validated for New Bottlerocket OS

By Trend Micro

Containers provide a list of benefits to organizations that use them. They’re light, flexible, add consistency across the environment and operate in isolation.

However, security concerns prevent some organizations from employing containers. This is despite containers having an extra layer of security built in – they don’t run directly on the host OS.

To make containers even easier to manage, AWS released an open-source Linux-based operating system meant for hosting containers. While Bottlerocket AMIs are provided at no cost, standard Amazon EC2 and AWS charges apply for running Amazon EC2 instances and other services.

Bottlerocket is purpose-built to run containers and improves security and resource utilization by only including the essential software to run containers, which improves resource utilization and reduces the attack surface compared to general-purpose OS’s.

At Trend Micro, we’re always focused on the security of our customers cloud environments. We’re proud to be a launch partner for AWS Bottlerocket, with our Smart Check component validated for the OS prior to the launch.

Why use additional security in cloud environments

While an OS specifically for containers that includes native security measures is a huge plus, there seems to be a larger question of why third-party security solutions are even needed in cloud environments. We often hear a misconception with cloud deployment that, since the cloud service provider has built in security, users don’t have to think about the security of their data.

That’s simply not accurate and leaves a false sense of security. (Pun intended.)

Yes – cloud providers like AWS build in security measures and have addressed common problems by adding built in security controls. BUT cloud environments operate with a shared responsibility model for security – meaning the provider secures the environment, and users are responsible for their instances and data hosted therein.

That’s for all cloud-based hosting, whether in containers, serverless or otherwise.

 

Why Smart Check in Bottlerocket matters

Smooth execution without security roadblocks

DevOps teams leverage containerized applications to deploy fast and don’t have time for separate security roadblocks. Smart Check is built for the DevOps community with real-time image scanning at any point in the pipeline to ensure insecure images aren’t deployed.

Vulnerability scanning before runtime

We have the largest vulnerability data set of any security vendor, which is used to scan images for known software flaws before they can be exploited at runtime. This not only includes known vendor vulnerabilities from the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), but also vulnerability intelligence for bugs patched outside the ZDI program and open source vulnerability intelligence built in through our partnership with Snyk.

Flexible enough to fit with your pipeline

Container security needs to be as flexible as containers themselves. Smart Check has a simple admin process to implement role-based access rules and multiple concurrent scanning scenarios to fit your specific pipeline needs.

Through our partnership with AWS, Trend Micro is excited to help ensure customers can continue to execute on their portion of the shared responsibility model through container image scanning by validating that the Smart Check solution will be available for customers to run on Bottlerocket at launch.

More information can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/bottlerocket/

If you are still interested in learning more, check out this AWS blog from Jeff Barr.

The post Smart Check Validated for New Bottlerocket OS appeared first on .

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