Jesse: Welcome to Meanwhile in Security where I, your host Jesse Trucks, guides you to better security in the cloud.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org, in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of: canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.

Jesse: The general theme in security news and trends show us that perimeter defense has a whole new meaning. There is no large perimeter anymore. Nearly every device is on a public or otherwise hostile network, from servers to phones to laptops. Every device needs scanning, protecting, monitoring, and analyzing. None of these devices can be viewed in a vacuum, as separate entities without the context of behavior of systems and services accessed from across a network.

This is why zero trust and cloud native applications and services go so well in these hard times. If you can’t trust anything without checking on current events, then you have to authenticate and analyze in real-time to determine if something is safe to allow. In the ancient days of yore, everything was default allow and you stopped things you knew were bad. Then along came default deny, where you allowed only those things you white listed. But that was a full-time allowance of bad things to happen when an account was compromised.

Ditch the white list and just implement real-time contextual security. If you do this, does it really matter if someone gets a hostile device on your network? Nope. If you treat everything, including owned and managed assets, as hostile, some new unmanaged device or service doesn’t change your operations or exposure much if at all.

Meanwhile in the news. Cloud Security Basics CIOs and CTOs Should Know. Some of the critical things non-cybersecurity execs ought to know: moving to the cloud isn’t a security easy button, cybersecurity insurance generally sucks, and moving to the cloud takes a lot more work than people think to get operationally secure.

Spring 2021 PCI DSS report now available with nine services added in scope. When you do compliance and use cloud infrastructures and SaaS services, you need to prove your services support compliance requirements. This AWS report can help. Also, review the new services added to see if you can improve your service delivery and applications supporting PCI.

Top 5 Benefits of Cloud Infrastructure Security. Using the cloud doesn’t make you more secure, but there are advantages that can make
security more manageable in the cloud than it is in legacy data centers.

The three most important AWS WAF rate-based rules. Sometimes ya just got to geek out. Also, your security person won’t always be there to set up things like Web Application Firewalls with DDOS mitigation and other nifty security and compliance tools.

Researchers Call for ‘CVE’ Approach for Cloud Vulnerabilities. If there is a vulnerability in cloud service provider services, they should get a CVE like anyone else, right? After all, it’s just software, which is what the CVE is supposed to track.

I understand shining light on the problems to force cloud companies to fix them, but that is partly what the CVE system is for. If there are configurations that open gaping security holes, they need to be in CVE. Why do they want to make a new thing to replace a perfectly good thing?

Announcer: If you have several PostgreSQL databases running behind NAT, check out Teleport, an open-source identity-aware access proxy. Teleport provides secure access to anything running behind NAT, such as SSH servers or Kubernetes clusters and—new in this release—PostgreSQL instances, including AWS RDS. Teleport gives users superpowers like authenticating via SSO with multi-factor, listing and seeing all database instances, getting instant access to them using popular CLI tools or web UIs. Teleport ensures best security practices like role-based access, preventing data exfiltration, providing visibility, and ensuring compliance. Download Teleport at goteleport.com. That’s goteleport.com.

Jesse: Managed Private Cloud: It’s all About Simplification. So, let’s see if I understand this. Several article sources talk about the benefits of using private cloud citing the exact same benefits as using a public cloud service, except claiming it’s more secure for finance and medical verticals. Hello folks, AWS Outposts anyone? The only difference is the shared responsibility model, except that now you have an outside agency managing everything. Neither are more or less secure than the other. They are different approaches to risk acceptance and mitigation.

100 percent of companies experience public cloud security incidents. Despite the sensationally alluring feel of the headline, the real news from this is that moving to cloud operations exposes the horrible lack of processes around custom development and production management that most organizations have. Don’t blame being in the cloud for your poor operations, just don’t be stupid.

Why cloud security is the key to unlocking value from hybrid working. [sigh]. Hybrid cloud, hybrid cars, hybrid corn, and now hybrid work. I haven’t understood why it’s so hard to understand that there are additional security concerns and either increased or displaced risk pushing workloads and data to the cloud. The only common answer I can think of is that security in general is full of theater and drama. Of course, there’s more risk. Obfuscated risk is dangerous.

Organizations Still Struggle to Hire & Retain Infosec Employees: Report. The extreme lack of trained and/or experienced cybersecurity talent underscores the importance of all of us knowing security well enough to mitigate most risks. Sure, having someone dedicated to the work is far superior to having security tacked onto the duties of others, but without the ability to fill those dedicated roles, someone has to keep the script kiddies and APTs out.

NSA, CISA release Kubernetes Hardening Guidance. This is pure IT security gold. The spooks often hold secrets most of us haven’t figured out, partially due to the immense resources they throw at cybersecurity. This report is 52 pages of great advice. Also, now everyone knows security issues in Kubernetes environments. Don’t be stupid. Go read this now.

HTTP/2 Implementation Errors Exposing Websites to Serious Risks. Black hat and other security conferences are famous for gloom and doom pronouncements that are just theoretical attacks that likely won’t ever be practical in real-world production systems. However, this one may have some legs.

Ransomware Gangs and the Name Game Distraction. With ransomware groups regularly getting international media attention, they’re retreating to the shadows when the heat turns up on them. They will vanish from headlines, but they will simply rebrand and move forward as if they were a new group. This is why following Indicators Of Compromise, or IOCs, is more important than worrying about the exact behavior profile or name of a group.

And now for the tip of the week. Don’t lose overwritten file data. Use S3 versioning. Enabling versioning on your S3 buckets allows disaster recovery and an audit trail for changes in your data objects. The docs are fairly straightforward, as well. Check out the AWS doc section called: Using versioning in S3 buckets. And that’s it for the week, folks. Securely yours, Jesse Trucks.

Jesse: Thanks for listening. Please subscribe and rate us on Apple and Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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