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The Summary is dead. Long live the Summary!

Rich February 12, 2016 1 Comment

As part of our changes at Securosis this year, it’s time to say goodbye to the old Friday Summary, and hello to the new one. Adrian and I started the Summary way back before Mike joined the company, as our own version of his weekly Security Incite. Our objective was to review the highlights of the week, both our work and things we found on the Internet, typically with an introduction based on events in our personal lives. As we look at growing and changing our focus this year, it’s time for a different format. Mike’s Incite (usually released on Wednesdays) does a great job highlighting important security stories, or whatever we find interesting. The Summary has always overlapped a bit. We also developed a tendency to overstuff it with links. Moving forward we are switching gears, and the Summary will now focus on our main coverage areas: cloud, DevOps, and automation security. The new sections will be more tightly curated and prioritized, to better fit a weekly newsletter format for folks who don’t have time to keep up on everything. We plan to keep the Incite our source for general security industry analysis, with the revised Summary targeting our new focus areas. We are also changing our email list provider from Aweber to MailChimp due to an ongoing technical issue. As part of that switch we will soon offer more email subscription options, which we used to have. You can pick the daily digest of all our posts, the weekly Incite, and/or the weekly Summary. If you want to subscribe directly to the Friday Summary only, just click here. If you have any feedback, as always please feel free to leave a comment or email us at //info@securosis.com. And don’t forget: The EIGHTH Annual Disaster Recovery Breakfast: Clouds Ahead. Top Posts for the Week We missed it when it was released, but Google now has limited management plane logging support. It still isn’t up to CloudTrail, and it’s still in beta, but this is one of the most critical security capabilities enterprises need from a cloud provider. Rumor is Microsoft also has it in beta. This is another good example of using AWS capabilities for security functionality. This is the sort of thing that is built into most WAFs (including cloud WAFs) but we like this post more for showing how you can automate and wire things together than for its particular use case. How to Configure Rate-Based Blacklisting with AWS WAF and AWS Lambda A good non-security perspective on Continuous Delivery. We see a lot of organizations throw the term (along with DevOps) around without focusing on some of the foundational things you need to make it work. Are you ready for Continuous Delivery? GitHub posted a good incident report. This can serve as a decent model for both security and non-security incidents: January 28th Incident Report Node is really popular, but still gives us the security willies at times. This good piece lays out some of the issues: The battle for Node.js security has only begun CloudFormation and other immutable infrastructure tools often have gaps, especially when new products are released. Here’s how to use Python to deal with them, using a security example: Customizing CloudFormation with Python Props to Amazon for this one: AWS’ exhaustive terms of service covers zombie outbreaks Tool of the Week This is a new section highlighting a cloud, DevOps, or security tool we think you should take a look at. We still struggle to keep track of all the interesting tools that can help us; if you have submissions please email them to //info@securosis.com. We are still looking at how we want to handle logging as we rearchitect securosis.com. Our friend Matt J. recommended I look at the fluentd open source log collector. It looks like a good replacement for Logstash, which is pretty heavy and can be hard to configure. You can pump everything into fluentd in an instance, container, or auto-scaled cluster if you need it. It can perform analysis right there, plus you can send them down the chain to things like ElasticSearch/Kibana, AWS Kinesis, or different kinds of storage. What I really like is how it normalizes data into JSON as much as possible, which is great because that’s how we are structuring all our Trinity application logs. Our plan is to use fluentd with some basic rules for securosis.com, pushing the logs into AWS hosted ElasticSearch (to reduce management overhead), and then Kibana to roll our own SIEM. We see a bunch of clients following a similar approach. This also fits well into cloud logging architectures where you collect the logs locally and only send alerts back to the SOC. Especially with S3 support, that can really reduce overall costs. Securosis Blog Posts this Week Securing Hadoop: Operational Security Issues. Other Securosis News and Quotes Cloud Security: Software Defined. Event Driven. Awesome. We are posting our RSA Conference Guide on the RSA Conference blog – here are the latest posts: The Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference 2016: The FUD Awakens! Securosis Guide: Threat Intelligence & Bothan Spies Securosis Guide: R2DevOps Securosis Guide: Escape from Cloud City Training and Events We are giving multiple presentations at the RSA Conference. Rich and Mike are presenting Cloud Security Accountability Tour. Rich is co-presenting with Bill Shinn of AWS: Aspirin as a Service: Using the Cloud to Cure Security Headaches. David Mortman is presenting: Learning from Unicorns While Living with Legacy Docker: Containing the Security Excitement Docker: Containing the Security Excitement (Focus-On) Leveraging Analytics for Data Protection Decisions Rich is presenting on Rugged DevOps at Scale at DevOps Connect the Monday of RSAC We are running two classes at Black Hat USA. Cloud Security Hands-On (CCSK-Plus) Advanced Cloud Security and Applied SecDevOps Share:

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