In this, our second Firestarter on multicloud deployments, we start digging into the technological differences between the cloud providers. We start with the concept of how to organize your account(s). Each provider uses different terminology but all support similar hierarchies. From the overlay of AWS organizations to the org-chart-from-the-start of an Azure tenant we dig into the details and make specific recommendations. We also discuss the inherent security barriers and cover a wee bit of IAM. Watch or listen:
Breaking Attacker Kill Chains in AWS: IAM Roles Over the past year I’ve seen a huge uptick in interest for concrete advice on handling security incidents inside the cloud, with cloud native techniques. As organizations move their production workloads to the cloud, it doesn’t take long for the security professionals to realize that the fundamentals, while conceptually similar, are quite different in practice. One of those core concepts is that of the kill chain, a term first coined by Lockheed Martin to describe the attacker’s process. Break any link and you break the attack, so this maps
This is our first in a series of Firestarters covering multicloud. Using more than one IaaS cloud service provider is, well, a bit of a nightmare. Although this is widely recognized by anyone with hands-on cloud experience that doesn’t mean reality always matches our desires. From executives worried about lock in to M&A activity we are finding that most organizations are being pulled into multicloud deployments. In this first episode we lay out the top level problems and recommend some strategies for approaching them. Watch or listen:
I’m not a fan of dissecting complex data breaches when we don’t have any information. In this case we do know more than usual due to the details in the complaint filed by the FBI. I want to be very clear that this post isn’t to blame anyone and we have only the most basic information on what happened. The only person we know is worthy of blame here is the attacker. As many people know Capital One makes heavy use of Amazon Web Services. We know AWS was involved in the attack because the federal complaint
Build Your Own Multi-Cloud Security Monitoring in 30 Minutes or Less with StreamAlert One of the most difficult problems in cloud security is building comprehensive multi-account/multi-cloud security monitoring and alerting. I’d say maybe 1 out of 10 organizations I assess or work with have something effective in place when I first show up. That’s why I added a major monitoring lab based on AirBnB’s StreamAlert project to the Securosis Advanced Cloud Security and Applied DevSecOps training class (we still have some spots available for our Black Hat 2019 class). Read the full post at DisruptOps
Apple events follow a very consistent pattern, which rarely changes beyond the details of the content. This consistency has gradually become its own language. Attend enough events and you start to pick up the deliberate undertones Apple wants to communicate, but not express directly. They are the facial and body expressions beneath the words of the slides, demos, and videos. Five years ago I walked out of the WWDC keynote with a feeling that those undertones were screaming a momentous shift in Apple’s direction. That privacy was emerging as a foundational principle for the company. I wrote up my
I’ve seen a huge increase in the number of questions about cloud providers beyond AWS over the past year, especially in recent months. I decided to write up an overview comparison over at DisruptOps. This will be part of a slow-roll series going into the differences across the major security program domains – including monitoring, perimeter security, and security management. Here’s an excerpt: The problem for security professionals is that security models and controls vary widely across providers, are often poorly documented, and are completely incompatible. Anyone who tells you they can pick up on these nuances in a
To wrap up this series we will bring you through a process of narrowing down the shortlist and then testing products and/or services in play. With email it’s less subjective because malicious email is… well, malicious. But given the challenges of policy management at scale (discussed in our last post), you’ll want to ensure a capable UX and sufficient reporting capabilities as well. Let’s start with the first rule of buying anything: you drive the process. You’ll have vendors who want you to use their process, their RFP/RFP language, their PoC guide, and their
As we continue down the road of Selecting Enterprise Email Security, let’s hone in on the ‘E’ word: Enterprise. Email is a universal application, and scaling up protection to the enterprise level is all about managing email security in a consistent way. So this post will dig into selecting the security platform, integrating with other enterprise security controls, and finally some adjacent services which can improve the security of your email and so should be considered as part of broad protection. Platform The first choice is which platform you will build your email security on. Before you can compare
As we covered in the introduction to our Selecting Enterprise Email Security series, even after over a decade of trying to address the issue, email-borne attacks are still a scourge on pretty much every enterprise. That doesn’t mean the industry hasn’t made progress – it’s just that between new attacker tactics and the eternal fallibility of humans clicking on things, we’re arguably in about the same place we’ve been all along. As you are considering upgrading technologies to address these email threats, let’s focus on detection – the cornerstone of any email security strategy. To improve
