Rich here.

Not a lot of news from us this week, because we’ve mostly been traveling, and for Mike and me the kids’ school year is coming to a close.

Last week I was at the Rocky Mountain Information Security Conference in Denver. The Denver ISSA puts on a great show, but due to some family scheduling I didn’t get to see as many sessions as I hoped. I presented my usual pragmatic cloud pitch, a modification of my RSA session from this year. It seems one of the big issues organizations are still facing is a mixture of where to get started on cloud/DevOps, with switching over to understand and implement the fundamentals.

For example, one person in my session mentioned his team thought they were doing DevOps, but actually mashed some tools together without understanding the philosophy or building a continuous integration pipeline. Needless to say, it didn’t go well.

In other news, our advanced Black Hat class sold out, but there are still openings in our main class I highlighted the course differences in a post.

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Top Posts for the Week

  • Another great post from the Signal Sciences team. This one highlights a session from DevOps Days Austin by Dan Glass of American Airlines. AA has some issues unique to their industry, but Dan’s concepts map well to any existing enterprise struggling to transition to DevOps while maintaining existing operations. Not everyone has the luxury of building everything from scratch. Avoiding the Dystopian Road in Software.
  • One of the most popular informal talks I give clients and teach is how AWS networking works. It is completely based on this session, which I first saw a couple years ago at the re:Invent conference – I just cram it into 10-15 minutes and skip a lot of the details. While AWS-specific, this is mandatory for anyone using any kind of cloud. The particulars of your situation or provider will differ, but not the issues. Here is the latest, with additional details on service endpoints: AWS Summit Series 2016 | Chicago – Another Day, Another Billion Packets.
  • In a fascinating move, Jenkins is linking up with Azure, and Microsoft is tossing in a lot of support. I am actually a fan of running CI servers in the cloud for security, so you can tie them into cloud controls that are hard to implement locally, such as IAM. Announcing collaboration with the Jenkins project.
  • Speaking of CI in the cloud, this is a practical example from Flux7 of adding security to Git and Jenkins using Amazon’s CodeDeploy. TL;DR: you can leverage IAM and Roles for more secure access than you could achieve normally: Improved Security with AWS CodeCommit.
  • Netflix releases a serverless Open Source SSH Certificate Authority. It runs on AWS Lambda, and is definitely one to keep an eye on: Netflix/bless.
  • AirBnB talks about how they integrated syslog into AWS Kinesis using osquery (a Facebook tool I think I will highlight as tool of the week): Introducing Syslog to AWS Kinesis via Osquery – Airbnb Engineering & Data Science.

Tool of the Week

osquery by Facebook is a nifty Open Source tool to expose low-level operating system information as a real-time relational database. What does that mean? Here’s an example that finds every process running on a system where the binary is no longer on disk (a direct example from the documentation, and common malware behavior):

SELECT name, path, pid FROM processes WHERE on_disk = 0;

This is useful for operations but it’s positioned as a security tool. You can use it for File Integrity Monitoring, real-time alerting, and a whole lot more. The site even includes ‘packs’ for common needs including OS X attacks, compliance, and vulnerability management.

Securosis Blog Posts this Week

Other Securosis News and Quotes

Another quiet week…

Training and Events

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