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Monday, August 31, 2020

More than 50k Australian Driving Licenses leaked online

In what is supposed to be a massive data breach in the history of New South Wales(NSW), Australia, driving licenses of over 50,000 populace were leaked online after hackers got access to the information stored on Amazon Cloud Storage services.

Bob Diachenko, the security consultant from Ukraine, got hold of the data after it was being sold online in PDF and JPG file formats as over 109,000 images bought from over 54,000 licenses & related toll gate notices were put on sale by the hackers.

Mr. Bob has cited the leak as ‘very serious’ as he says that the data could be used by fraudsters to drain the bank accounts of driving license users or be applied for credit card loans as the stolen info includes addresses, date of births and contact phone numbers. What if the hacker uses it for purchase of furniture, or for phone or bank account verification…?

“The front and back of the licenses was available for access from a mis-configured Amazon S3 storage bucket and some data containing information related to Roads and Maritime Services Toll Notices was also procured”, said Bob.

NSW Transport department issued a statement early today that they do not keep any toll data on their servers and is working closely with Cyber Security NSW to know the details of severity from depth.

NOTE– The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) may penalize companies or federal organizations when they fail to protect their user data and the fine can range in between $1 million to $200,000 depending on the severity of the data breach.

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September 01, 2020 at 10:35AM

Elon Musk Neuralink puts AI chip in a Pig

Neuralink, the startup backed by multi billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla has achieved a milestone recently when its scientists inserted an Artificial Intelligence based silicon processor into the brain of a pig.

Named Gertrude, the pig now has a coin-sized computer in its brain that has been put in June 2020. Scientists say that the baconer is doing well with AI chip in brain and might help the medical field in curing human diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord related malfunctions.

“An implant can easily resolve such neurological issues”, said Musk in a tweet on Friday.

Technically, Neuralink has been working in inserting silicon wafers into human brains since 2016, and the San Francisco based startup has attained success in doing so by implanting wireless brain-computer interfaces operating on electrodes. The first AI chip to be inserted into the human will be done in 2021 and is aimed to treat patients suffering from paralysis or paraplegia.

However, other scientists from the related AI field say that the approach should be filled with caution as there are a lot of concerns to be studied further.

Note- Since its inception in 2016, the San Francisco based startup has been hitting news headlines for its research in Neurotechnology. The organization is known for hiring some reputed scientists from various universities across the globe and has been working on a small coin sized brain chip propelled by AI that can help a human in doing different brain related functions. In Aug’2020 the company was given FDA approved rights for using Neuralink 1024 Electrode Read/write link device to be inserted into the brain of humans for testing.

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September 01, 2020 at 10:33AM

ERI Announces Fresno Job Fair as Employee Roster Continues to Grow

FRESNO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ERI, the nation’s largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company, announced today that due to continued growth , it is looking to add a number of long-term employees to its staff and will stage a safe, socially distanced drive-up job fair on Tuesday, September 1st from 9:00 am – 11:00 am at 2680 S. East Ave. in Fresno. The event will be managed by hiring agency Exact Staff.

Available jobs include demolition (power/hand tools), sorting, sanitation, and asset management (tech). First and second shift positions are available. Pay rates are $14 per hour and full time and overtime opportunities are available. $25 gift cards will be raffled off each hour to lucky attendees.

Organizers ask that applicants not enter the facility. This is a drive-up event and Exact Staff representatives will meet applicants outside the facility. Drive to the 2680 S. East Avenue location and please arrive with a face covering or mask before speaking with the Exact Staff representative.

“We’re very proud to continue offering great jobs across the nation as we continue to grow even during this highly challenging time,” said John Shegerian, ERI’s Executive Chairman. “We know that many great and qualified people have lost their jobs because of COVID-19 and are looking to ‘recycle’ their careers and grow with us!”

Shegerian added that this will be the first of several forthcoming hiring fairs for ERI around the country and that interested applicants are encouraged to visit https://eridirect.com/drive-up-job-fair/ for more details about this first event.

ERI is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States. ERI is certified at the highest level by all leading environmental and data security oversight organizations to de-manufacture, recycle, and refurbish every type of electronic device in an environmentally responsible manner. ERI has the capacity to process more than a billion pounds of electronic waste annually at its eight certified locations, serving every zip code in the United States. ERI’s mission is to protect organizations, people and the environment. For more information about e-waste recycling and ERI, call 1-800-ERI-DIRECT or visit https://eridirect.com.

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September 01, 2020 at 09:09AM

Aviation cybersecurity: Hurdles of staying secure on the ground and at 36,000 feet

This blog was written by an independent guest blogger.
Image Source: Pexels
Digitization has made its way into every industry. With this shift comes many benefits as well as the risk of a cyber attack. This is especially true in aviation. No matter how securely companies can build networks to ward off cyber attacks, the risk is never absent.
With planes operating thousands of feet off the ground — often full of commercial passengers — a digital attack can potentially cost lives as well as millions in damages. To mitigate these risks, aviation companies operate strict cybersecurity processes.
Even still, there are hurdles to cybersecurity both on the ground and in the air that airlines are working to address as the future slips into increasingly digital territory. Here, we’ll explore these threats and the means with which progress is being made in aviation cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity Hurdles on the…

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August 31, 2020 at 09:11PM

eSentire Included in Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services for Fifth Consecutive Year

WATERLOO, Ontario & SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–eSentire, Inc., category creator and world’s largest Managed Detection and Response (MDR) company, announces its inclusion as a Representative Vendor in Gartner’s 2020 Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services[1] for the fifth consecutive year since the analyst firm defined this cybersecurity sub-category with its first MDR Market Guide.

According to the Market Guide, Gartner has observed “a 44 percent growth in end users’ inquiries into MDR services during the past 12 months.” The firm anticipates that “by 2025, 50 percent of organizations will be using MDR services for threat monitoring, detection, and response functions that offer threat containment capabilities.”

“eSentire is pleased to be included in the Gartner Market Guide for the fifth consecutive year,” said Kerry Bailey, CEO, eSentire. “We know that clients look to MDR providers to act as a true extension of their security operations teams. Gartner notes that ‘most MDR providers lack the vetting and decades of competition that MSSPs have faced,’ however, we’ve been delivering true MDR for over a decade now and we pride ourselves on being the most trusted name in MDR.”

“With over a million active threat responses daily, at an average of 35 seconds to initiate action and 20 minutes to respond, isolate and contain a threat, and a net customer retention rate of over 116 percent, it’s clear why we lead the market,” Bailey continued. “Our ability to rapidly learn and work at cloud scale, combined with our expert human actions, stops breaches and reduces customer risk in ways unattainable by late-to-the-game MDR providers. No one does it better. ”

The Market Guide further notes that “coverage for cloud services, such as software as a service and infrastructure as a service, has improved during the past 12 months; however, it is still a work in progress for many MDR service providers.” Leading the industry, eSentire began rolling out its esCLOUD portfolio in late 2019 with esCLOUD for SaaS support for the largest SaaS provider, Microsoft 365. esCLOUD for IaaS introduced support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in early 2020. Subsequently, the company has added support for Google G Suite, and plans to add Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dropbox and Box support shortly. The esCLOUD portfolio extends eSentire MDR services to provide detection, investigation and response capabilities to customer IaaS and SaaS cloud environments. Due to the dynamic and elastic nature of IaaS resources, misconfiguration of those resources is the main threat to cloud infrastructure. esCLOUD for IaaS provides real-time visibility of cloud assets, enabling immediate configuration assessment, baselining of typical behavior of assets, alerting on potentially malicious behavior, remediation to isolate the threat, and reporting against various regulatory and/or compliance frameworks.

eSentire’s Atlas platform is purpose-built on cloud-native architecture, enabling end-to-end proactive protection. Built on patented AI technologies, Atlas learns across eSentire’s global customer base, immediately extending protection to every customer with each specific detection. This ability to rapidly learn and work at cloud scale, combined with expert human actions, stops breaches and reduces customer risk in ways unattainable by traditional security products, legacy MSSPs and other providers who claim to offer MDR. In tandem, eSentire Security Operations Center (SOC) threat hunters actively respond to and contain threats in individual customers’ environments on average once every two minutes. These expert interventions are immediately deployed by Atlas’ orchestration and automation to stop threats that successfully evade firewalls and antivirus, on average once per minute for every customer.

“Organizations not capable of maintaining the mapping of threats against existing and emerging technologies are particularly strong candidates for an MDR partner. The ability to know with certainty that you have all that is necessary to detect the most common and known threats is not trivial. MDR services are a good way to gain this expertise,” said Bailey. “We have designed our solutions to offer this expertise in various approaches, including providing a full technology stack, monitoring cloud, OT and IoT feeds, managing a point solution, or just taking advantage of a customer’s existing technology stack.”

To download a copy of Gartner’s 2020 Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, visit: https://www.esentire.com/resources/library/2020-gartner-market-guide-for-managed-detection-and-response-services.

Learn more about eSentire Managed Detection and Response.

[1] Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, Toby Bussa, Kelly Kavanagh, Pete Shoard, John Collins, Craig Lawson, Mitchell Schneider, 26 August 2020

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About eSentire:

eSentire, Inc., founded in 2001, is the category creator and world’s largest Managed Detection and Response (MDR) company, safeguarding businesses of all sizes with the industry-defining, cloud-native Atlas platform that removes blind spots and enables 24×7 threat hunters to contain attacks and stop breaches within minutes. Its threat-driven, customer-focused culture makes the difference in eSentire’s ability to attract the best talent across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and cloud-native skill sets. Its highly skilled teams work together toward a common goal to deliver the best customer experience and security efficacy in the industry. For more information, visit www.esentire.com and follow @eSentire.

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August 31, 2020 at 09:09PM

DoD Cyber Veteran Blake Moore Joins Wickr to Advance Company Strategy, Scale Secure Communications

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Wickr Inc., the secure collaboration platform, today announced the appointment of Blake Moore as Vice President of Strategy and Operations. Moore joins the company from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), where he most recently served as Chief of Staff for the Chief Information Officer (CIO). At Wickr, Moore will lead company strategy with a focus on scaling the organization’s footprint across the government and commercial sectors.

Moore brings over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity and operations, including 15 years at the DoD. He played a crucial role in advancing cyberspace operations and IT modernization across the federal government, including helping stand up the U.S. Cyber Command Cyber National Mission Force. He also led the Department’s 2018 Cyber Strategy and helped advance digital modernization efforts. More recently, Moore was a key part of the DoD CIO Telework Readiness Task Force focused on DoD’s transition to a remote working environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved scaling Microsoft Teams for use across the DoD to ensure continued mission readiness.

“When it comes to secure and resilient communications, no one is doing it at the level Wickr is,” said Moore. “It’s the exact tool you want to have in your pocket if you’re going up against a near peer competitor in a cyber contested environment. There is a massive need not only within the DoD, but across the public and private sectors for collaboration communication tools that are resilient to disruption. Wickr has a world-class product that fills that need. I’m excited to drive company strategy in a way that delivers the benefits of strong encryption for warfighters and corporations alike.”

With so much of the Nation’s workforce in both the public and private sectors continuing to work outside of the confines of the office, the need for reliable, secure communications has never been greater. Wickr has a critically important role to play in the deployment of secure communications.

“Blake’s experience with the DoD’s cybersecurity and digital modernization efforts makes him an incredibly valuable addition to our team,” said Joel Wallenstrom, President and CEO of Wickr. “His understanding of both the public and private sectors makes him uniquely positioned to lead our company strategy at a time when the demand for secure communications is growing rapidly.”

Wickr has a growing footprint in the federal and defense markets, and currently provides secure communications for each of the DoD Military Services with end-to-end encrypted files, video, chat, text and voice services for end-users. The company was recently awarded a $35M Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract with the U.S. Air Force to enable Air Force personnel to securely communicate anywhere in the world.

To learn more about Wickr, visit: www.wickr.com

About Wickr:

Wickr’s mission is to secure the world’s most critical communications. Wickr provides the highest standard of encryption trusted by millions worldwide. In the workplace and out in the field, Wickr enables end users to communicate securely and protect their privacy while providing IT organizations the administrative controls needed to deploy at scale and provides flexible options and controls for information governance and compliance for regulated industries. To learn more, visit www.wickr.com.

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August 31, 2020 at 09:08PM

REvil Ransomware attack on Ma Labs

As per a report revealed by Cybersecurity firm Cyble, Ma Labs, a company that offers components related to computer hardware was reportedly targeted by REvil ransomware group that has taken hold of 956 GB of sensitive files and is threatening to auction the stolen files on dark web if its ransom demand is not full filled.

Cybersecurity Insiders has learnt that the attack took place early this month impacting over 1,000 servers of the California based company and that includes documents related to employees, clients and partners.

In the last weekend, REvil operators shared some screenshots of the siphoned data with Cyble which analyzed that the cyber crooks accessed vital info such as email content, bank transactions related data, and certificates related to stocks purchased.

CRN news resource was the first to report this news on its portal on Friday last week and added that the ransomware attack might have taken place because of an email phishing attack on the accounts department.

NOTE- REvil, also known as Sodinokibi Ransomware group is a cyber crime unit that became famous after launching a ransomware attack on law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks to steal around 1TB sensitive data in May 2020. The stolen data includes information related to Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Christina Aguilera, Maria Carrey, Donald Trump, and renowned singer Madonna. A certain section of media also speculated that the hackers group demanded $42 million from US President Donald Trump for not leaking the data files.

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August 31, 2020 at 08:46PM

Sunday, August 30, 2020

India Paytm Mall suffers data breach leaking passwords

Indian online retailer Paytm Mall, that according to Indian Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is a platform crafted as “Pay to Modi”(A financial platform developed to pay to Indian Prime Minister Shri Narender Modi) is in news for all wrong reasons.

A Cybersecurity firm named Cyble says that the Vijay Shekar Sharma led company suffered a data breach recently, and the hackers received a payment for not leaking the accessed information such as passwords.

The security firm added in its media update that Paytm Mall, a financial arm of Paytm company, paid a handsome sum to cyber crooks for not locking down the database with ransomware.

However, Paytm Mall has denied the news and said that the speculations made by a certain section of media were false and assured that all data related to users, company and transactions was 100% secure on the servers with them.

A Paytm spokesperson confirmed the news and added that they have gained a security audit report from their staff saying that all data and the servers were safe and well isolated from any kind of hacking activity.

But Greater Atlanta based Cyber Security firm Cyble led by Beenu Arora claims that their organization has evidence claiming the data breach in which all accounts and related information of Paytm Mall were accessed by hackers.

Unconfirmed sources say that the hack might have happened because of an insider working for Paytm Mall.

Note 1- Normally, Hackers leak data of a company when they do not get a ransom after encrypting a database. So, a source from Cyble claims that the hackers might have gained accessed to Paytm Mall login data at sometime early this month( i.e. Aug 2020) and since the Indian e-commerce firm failed to pay them a ransom for reasons, they leaked the data online for prospective buyers and forwarded the same to a security for authenticity.

Note 2- Paytm Mall App is a 2017 launched B2C online retail platform of Paytm that connects over 140,000 sellers to customers.

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August 31, 2020 at 10:46AM

Five Eyes launches probe on Cyber Attack on New Zealand Stock Exchange

A Cyber Attack launched on New Zealand’s NZX Stock Exchange will now on be investigated by Five Eyes countries and the probe will be besides the one being investigated by the State law enforcement of the country.

Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders have to make a note of the fact that ‘Five Eyes’ is an intelligence alliance comprising countries Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom along with New Zealand. It is a multilateral platform crafted to share intelligence between countries and that includes data related to cyber attacks and threats.

Last week on Tuesday, the normal trading operations taking place at NZX were disrupted by cyber attacks that were later probed to have launched on Monday and Friday respectively the same week.

On Friday last week, Grant Robertson, the Finance Minister asked the HCSB- the government agency assigned with the duty of protecting the National Infrastructure of NZ, to investigate the perpetrators behind the attack.

The Five Eyes is interested in learning the facts on whether any state funded actor was involved in the incident as its neighboring state Australia accused China for launching cyber crime against Australian Institutions since May this year.

Meanwhile, the stock markets opened to full-scale operations this week, after a halt of 4 consecutive days in the last week as the website of the stock exchange firm was targeted by a DDoS attack aka denial of service attack.

The NZ Government Communications Security Bureau contacted network threat analyzing company Akamai on Saturday to investigate the incidents related to the offshore attacks.

Mark Peterson, the Executive Chief of NZX assured that the situation was under control and they have beefed all security measures to thwart any kind of cyber threats in near future.

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August 31, 2020 at 10:41AM

New Handheld Scanner Integrates LF/HF RFID and 1D/2D Barcode

SYRACUSE, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–JADAK, a business unit of Novanta Corporation (“Novanta”), announces the release of the HS-1RS Secure Access Handheld Barcode Scanner, enabled with software from Imprivata and HID. The HS-1RS integrates 1D and 2D barcode scanning with LF/HF RFID smartcard/contact-less and prox card reading functionality in a single, ergonomic, and compact design. Clinicians can now use any ID badge for seamless and secure user authentication and access to medical devices while also capturing barcode data, such as patient wristbands or medication information, with a single device.

The HS-1RS Secure Access Scanner will help healthcare facilities adhere to recent guidelines from the FDA and the Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force requiring strong authentication by protecting patient information, ensuring that only authorized users can access medical devices and maintaining electronic records of staff members who have accessed the device, interacted with patients or administered medications. Through the JADAK partnerships with Imprivata and HID, now a single device can read all badge types from barcode to encrypted high frequency (HID iClass) as well as easily integrate into existing hospital ecosystems that utilize Imprivata single sign-on workflows. The Imprivata integration also saves valuable OEM engineering time and effort in three core areas including detect & connect, configuration and data retrieval to the hospital device.

Additional benefits to healthcare facilities include simplified workflows, time savings, and infection control, since clinicians can quickly tap their ID badge to log into devices or medicine cabinets as well identify patients instead of using a password or other methods that can spread infection and add a significant amount of time to the clinician workflow. And since the scanner was designed specifically for healthcare applications, the plastics are durable and sealed against sterilization and strong disinfectants typically used in hospital settings.

“We’re proud to partner with both Imprivata and HID and be the first to solve this challenge for our customers,” said Kurt Matheson, VP of Sales and Marketing, JADAK. “There are so many badge technologies it’s difficult for our customers to accommodate all of them, so this product provides a compatible solution for any LF or HF RFID badge type. Plus, hospitals are already familiar with industry leading Imprivata software, so integration and staff training should be seamless as well.”

Additional highlights of the HS-1RS Secure Access Handheld Barcode Scanner include:

  • Future-proof hardware, as hospitals adopt RFID for secure login, the device will not need to be replaced
  • Superior performance in scan speed, motion tolerance, curved surfaces and poor/damaged codes
  • Lifecycle management of the device is covered by JADAK—if changes occur, backwards compatibility is guaranteed
  • IP54 Rating to ensure internal components are protected during disinfection
  • Ergonomic form factor for clinician comfort and ease of use

For more product information, visit https://bit.ly/2D1daKz

About JADAK

JADAK, a business unit of Novanta, is a market leader in machine vision, RFID, barcode, printing, and color and light measurement products and services for original equipment manufacturers. The business designs and manufactures detection and analysis solutions that help customers solve unique inspection, tracking, scanning and documenting challenges. JADAK is based in Syracuse, New York, with sales and technical locations across the globe. For more information, visit www.jadaktech.com.

About Novanta

Novanta is a trusted technology partner to OEMs in the medical and advanced industrial technology markets, with deep proprietary expertise in photonics, vision and precision motion technologies. For more information, visit www.novanta.com.

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August 31, 2020 at 09:09AM

Cost-Effective Cloud Security for the Modern Enterprise: Part 2

Due to recent global events, conducting business has been an uphill battle across industries around the world–more so than ever before. While facing a decelerating global economy, organizations are still responsible for enabling their own remote workforce, protecting data and defending against cyberthreats, and reducing costs. Unfortunately, enterprises that manage disjointed security solutions experience a myriad of unnecessary financial costs, tied to operational bottlenecks, high management costs, and more.

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August 30, 2020 at 09:11PM

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Econolite Centracs® Mobility Supports Crowdsourced Traffic Data Analytics

ANAHEIM, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Econolite, the leader in one-stop-shop traffic management solutions, today announced that the recently released cloud-based Centracs® Mobility software platform now supports crowdsourced traffic data as an additional source of real-time roadway detection. The robust architecture of Centracs Mobility provides transportation agencies the flexibility of integrating real-time traffic data for signal performance measurement and optimization.

Crowdsourced traffic data has been steadily improving in quality over recent years. There has been an expected tipping point where this data source would have the accuracy and coverage of vehicles to be used as a trusted input for signal timing. “The widespread availability of mobile connections to both vehicles and cellular devices has made crowdsourced data a significant source of real-time information,” said Eric Raamot, Econolite’s Chief Technology Officer. “This form of ‘infrastructure-less’ data has already been leveraged for traffic incident reporting, predictive modeling, and travel time estimation, but has not previously been demonstrated to be a viable source of input for signal performance measures or signal optimization. By feeding this data into Centracs SPM’s cloud-based analytics, we can now take a significant leap forward in real-time signal optimization and enable our suite of SPM tools for agencies that may not have the prerequisite infrastructure deployed for traditional advance, or per-lane detection.”

Centracs Mobility, with SPM’s established real-time data analytics, is an ideal platform, providing a foundation for aggregating and leveraging both traditional detection data and real-time crowdsourced traffic data. Econolite is working with research programs to establish the feasibility to serve many use cases with crowdsourced data. Econolite’s software toolset can present signal performance metrics based on toggling the various types of data sources for direct comparison.

Centracs Mobility’s flexible architecture enables cities and transportation agencies to custom tailor it for their specific traffic control needs, maximizing their investment. It can be easily integrated with the latest in sensor technologies, and can be customized for any deployment level, delivering the highest levels of traffic control interoperability and automation. Centracs Mobility was developed based on user-feedback and designed to address the dynamic traffic control needs of today’s data-driven roadway networks and Smart City multimodal transportation environments.

About Econolite

Econolite’s ITS solutions ease traffic congestion, provide safer mobility, and improve quality of life. As the one-stop-shop leader for traffic management systems, sensor products, and services, Econolite is committed to the advancement of connected and autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and cybersecurity. For more information, visit us at www.econolite.com.

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August 30, 2020 at 09:08AM

Bitglass Awarded Fundamental Patent for Cloud Access Control

CAMPBELL, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Bitglass, the Total Cloud Security Company, has been awarded U.S. Patent No. 10,757,090 for its fundamental invention of a SAML relay, for transparent, real-time access control of cloud services. Since the time the patent was filed in 2015, the technology has become widely adopted by leading cloud security vendors.

The SAML relay allows for a security broker or proxy (aka CASB) to be transparently inserted into the traffic flow between users and cloud services, during the login process. Once the user logs in, the CASB considers the risk profile of the user, and determines the level of access to permit the user. The CASB may permit direct access to the application, proxied and controlled access to the application with data and threat protection enforced, or deny access altogether.

Anurag Kahol, CTO of Bitglass, said, “Since Bitglass’ founding, we’ve recognized that many organizations need a cloud-based solution that can secure application access from any device, whether a corporate device or a personal device. Our SAML relay technology has become the standard for enabling secure, ubiquitous access.”

“This patent is further recognition that Bitglass is the architect of SAML relay and reverse proxy technology that all CASB vendors have imitated,” said Nat Kausik, CEO of Bitglass. “For organizations that need transparent cloud security, the Bitglass CASB remains the solution of choice. Today, it is a core component of our SASE offering, along with our SmartEdge Secure Web Gateway and our zero trust network access.”

Want to see agentless CASB functionality or another one of Bitglass’ solutions for yourself? Request a free trial today.

About Bitglass

Bitglass delivers data and threat protection for any interaction, on any device, anywhere. Operating at cloud scale across a global network of over 200 points of presence, Bitglass delivers unrivaled performance and uptime to ensure secure business continuity for the largest organizations. Bitglass was founded in 2013 by a team of industry veterans with a proven track record of innovation and execution.

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August 29, 2020 at 09:09PM

RSA Conference Launches RSAC 365, a Year-Round Learning Program for the Cybersecurity Community

BEDFORD, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–RSA Conference, the world’s leading information security conferences and expositions, today announced RSAC 365, a new program that provides year-round learning opportunities for the cybersecurity community. The new program will offer the community relevant, unbiased and educational content, including webcasts, podcasts, blogs, videos and more for free.

“RSA Conference is already known for providing access to expert insights, while serving as the place where the world talks security, but our contribution to securing the digital world doesn’t stop on the last day of our events,” said Britta Glade, Director of Content and Creation at RSA Conference. “We’ve always curated content for the industry, and RSAC 365 is a new and more formal means for us to amplify the fresh ideas, unique voices, and expertise of the community year-round.”

With the launch of RSAC 365, RSA Conference is also introducing the RSAC 365 Call for Submissions, an open invitation to the community to submit ideas for consideration for online learning opportunities. The new approach is an always-on, year-round content submission process that encourages the cybersecurity community to showcase its perspective, to learn new skills and inspire discussion regarding some of the most pressing challenges facing the industry at large.

“We’re looking forward to engaging with our content contributors year-round with RSAC 365 Call for Submissions,” added Glade. “The content submission process is format agnostic, encouraging experts to be creative and push the envelope with their approach and expertise. We continue to be inspired by the passion and the resilience of the cybersecurity community and we’re incredibly excited to see what they choose to share.”

RSAC Call for Submissions is open now and RSA Conference will review submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year. For more information on RSAC 365 and RSAC Call for Submissions, please visit www.rsaconference.com.

About RSA Conference:

RSA Conference is the premier series of global events and year-round learning for the cybersecurity community. Whether attending in-person or online, RSAC is where the security industry converges to discuss current and future concerns and have access to the experts, unbiased content and ideas that help enable individuals and companies advance their cybersecurity posture and build stronger and smarter teams. RSAC brings the cybersecurity industry together, both in-person and virtually, and empowers the collective “we” to stand against cyberthreats around the world. RSAC is the ultimate marketplace for the latest technologies and hands-on educational opportunities that help industry professionals discover how to make their companies more secure while showcasing the most enterprising, influential and thought-provoking thinkers and leaders in cybersecurity today. For the most up-to-date news pertaining to the cybersecurity industry visit www.rsaconference.com. Where the world talks security.

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August 29, 2020 at 09:08PM

Friday, August 28, 2020

Bitglass Security Spotlight: Over 15 Billion Usernames and Passwords Are Now Available on the Dark Web

Here are the top stories of recent weeks:

  • Bank Details to Streaming Services, It Is All Available on the Dark Web
  • North Korea Is Linked to a Recent Cyberattack on US Enterprises
  • TikTok Mobile App on the Verge of Being Banned Due to Surveillance Concerns
  • Serious Security Concerns Over Smartwatch Tracker API Vulnerability
  • Nearly 100k Customers Exposed in Leaky Database Belonging to Fitness Platform

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August 29, 2020 at 09:10AM

Security Architecture podcast and the Bitglass SASE

With the rapid growth of the remote workforce, organizations are in need of a comprehensive security platform that offers a plethora of capabilities for securing today’s business environment. Recently, on Security Architecture, a podcast that covers best security practices, Bitglass’ VP of Product Management, Mike Schuricht, discussed the topic of secure access service edge (SASE), outbound browsing, and how they work.

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August 29, 2020 at 09:10AM

SWG without Certificate Hassles

Last week, we got a call from a leading Wall Street house. Their users were fed up of VPN to the office during the pandemic, and the CISO had a mandate for cloud-first network security.  The CISO had done his homework, and right out of the gate, zero’d in on the two things that mattered to them. Three things actually.  

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August 29, 2020 at 09:10AM

Cost-Effective Cloud Security for the Modern Enterprise: Part 3

In order to adapt and thrive in the remote workforce, organizations need cost-effective security solutions that protect data, block threats, and enable business operations without diminishing financial resources. As such, Bitglass has helped a number of organizations through its cloud-first SASE platform since the pandemic began. These organizations were able to achieve better security as well as save significant amounts of money by using Bitglass’ unified platform in place of multiple, disjointed point products. The following paragraphs detail a simplified, real-world scenario to demonstrate how much money organizations with about 10,000 users can save by upgrading to Bitglass (with a 4 year capital expenditure model for depreciating hardware appliances).

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August 29, 2020 at 09:10AM

APWG Q2 Report: Cybercrime Gangs Attempting and Achieving Heists of Ever Greater Scale

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The APWG’s new Phishing Activity Trends Report for Q2 2020 details how companies are losing money to criminals who are launching Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks as a more remunerative line of business than retail-accounts phishing. The organizations perfecting these criminal enterprises now include a sophisticated Russian cyber-gang, in addition to the West African scammers who have traditionally perpetrated BEC attacks.

APWG contributor Agari reports that the average wire transfer loss from BEC attacks smashed all previous frontiers, spiking from $54,000 in the first quarter to $80,183 in Q2 2020 as spearphishing gangs reached for bigger returns. Agari also found that scammers requested funds in 66 percent of BEC attack in the form of gift cards, which are easier to cash out. During the second quarter of 2020, the average amount of gift cards requested by BEC attackers was $1,213, down from $1,453 in the first quarter of 2020.

Agari also studied the movements of a BEC gang in Russia that it calls Cosmic Lynx. “We were expecting that Russian cybercriminals would move into the world of BEC because the return on investment for basic social engineering attacks is much higher than launching more sophisticated (and more expensive) malware-based attacks,” said Crane Hassold, Agari’s Senior Director of Threat Research. The average ransom demanded by Cosmic Lynx in its attacks runs to an astounding $1.27 million.

In other news, the number of phishing sites detected in the second quarter of 2020 was 146,994, down from the 165,772 observed in the first quarter. Phishing that targeted webmail and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) users continued to be biggest category of phishing. Attacks targeting the Social Media sector increased in Q2 about 20 percent over Q1, primarily driven by targeted attacks against Facebook and WhatsApp. After an explosion in 2019 and into the first quarter of 2020, phishing in Brazil dropped back slightly.

Abuse of Web security infrastructure reached a grim new plateau in Q2 2020, as well, with APWG contributor PhishLabs reporting that nearly 78 percent of all phishing websites employ SSL/TLS certificates as part of the deceptive schemes they use to lure in users and gain their confidence.

In addition, PhishLabs founder and CTO John LaCour observed, “The vast majority of certificates used in phishing attacks — 91 percent — are Domain Validated (“DV”) certificates. Interestingly, we found 27 web sites that were using Extended Validation (“EV”) certificates” – by hacking websites that already had them legitimately installed.

Read the full text of the report here: http://docs.apwg.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_q2_2020.pdf

About the APWG

APWG is the international coalition unifying the global response to cybercrime across industry, government and law-enforcement sectors and NGO communities. APWG’s membership of more than 2200 institutions worldwide is as global as its outlook. APWG’s directors, managers and research fellows advise national governments; global governance bodies like the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, OECD, International Telecommunications Union and ICANN; hemispheric and global trade groups; and multilateral treaty organizations such as the European Commission, the G8 High Technology Crime Subgroup, Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime, United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Europol EC3 and the Organization of American States. APWG is a member of the steering group of the Commonwealth Cybercrime Initiative at the Commonwealth of Nations. Operationally, the APWG conducts its missions through: APWG, a US-based 501(c)6 organization; the APWG.EU, the institution’s European chapter established in Barcelona in 2013 as a non-profit research foundation incorporated in Spain and managed by an independent board, including APWG founding directors; and the STOP. THINK. CONNECT. Messaging Convention, Inc., a US-based non-profit 501(c)3 corporation.

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August 29, 2020 at 09:09AM

Maximise IoT Power Design: Sleep. Sense. Connect. Repeat.

The latest cellular LPWAN solutions, such as, LTE M, NB-IoT and 5G have expanded the IoT landscape by delivering outstanding power and bandwidth efficiency, as well as expanded connectivity, even to remote and underground locations.

Yet, with so many wireless connectivity options to choose from today, researching the various advantages of each can be confusing and time consuming. We previously explored this issue as part of our foundational series – called IoT Masters. If you’re just starting out in the IoT, we’d recommend digesting these video resources before diving deeper into the world of connectivity.

To help you understand why cellular IoT is so beneficial, this blog explains how it develops, and how you can use it to maximise device battery life, providing you with the information needed to decide if it is right for your IoT project.

Why choose cellular IoT?

Cellular technology has progressed significantly over the past decade. Whether using NB-IoT, LTE-M, or sticking with legacy 2G and 3G technology until 5G networks are ready, cellular connectivity remains the top choice for IoT developers worldwide. This is because it provides the most reliable and stable connectivity in a variety of different environments – from high density crowded cities, to remote areas like wind power generation fields.  

How will 5G change cellular connectivity for IoT?

With cellular infrastructure constantly being improved and developed, the advantages associated with cellular technology will only become more apparent in the coming years – expanding their capacity with regards to global reach and maturing in its capabilities.

As such, by choosing cellular IoT, developers are offered a cost-efficient and seamless path to 5G technology when needed, even if they do not feel comfortable using 5G when their product is first made available.

Nonetheless, eventually, many developers in the IoT space will want to take advantage of the virtualisation and network slicing capabilities 5G will bring once this technology is firmly embedded. This will allow greater flexibility for bandwidth allocation and grouping IoT devices on specific bands based on QoS (Quality of Service) requirements. In this respect, cellular connectivity will offer even better cost efficiency and scalability for devices.

Given all these advantages, cellular IoT is a great option for a range of battery-operated applications like smart metering, inside smart cities for functions like heating control in buildings and asset tracking across the world.

However, as we all know from our experiences with objects using batteries, extending the life for as long as possible is essential for customer satisfaction. With each new smartphone release, for example, companies tout the percentage increase in battery life of the new model.

Protecting battery life and your IoT investment

The design of the device

Recognising the power consumption and battery life problems of IoT devices, organisations like the 3rd Generation Partnership Project recommend lower power classes be introduced, as well as reduced messaging for short data transactions, and simplified monitoring of neighbour cells, for all devices.

In addition, improvements introduced in the group’s ‘Release 13’ now allow application behaviour to be adjusted to the specific use case needs. For instance, it’s now possible to extend sleep cycle timing to as long as one year instead of 2.56s between paging cycles – or 23 sleep cycles per minute. With this kind of flexibility, devices operating in the field such as meters, and even very small devices like wearables could be extremely efficient.

The network choice

Yet, while these specifications certainly help, when it comes to energy efficiency, PSM (Power Saving Mode) and eDRX (Extended Discontinuous Reception) are also key.

It is for this reason that Mobile Network Operators in countries such as Japan, Australia, and North America have already retired 2G networks that do not support power consumption optimisation features like PSM or eDRX. Instead, developers looking for power efficiency are being encouraged to migrate to LPWAN technologies.

What else can you do to monitor power consumption of IoT devices?

Energy management tools also exist that can provide full insight into the power profile of your device. With this information, developers are able to easily visualise the power draw throughout the product development cycle to prevent battery drain and avoid pitfalls in development. By examining battery options in detail, developers can be aided in selecting the right product for each application, ultimately saving them money.

If you’d like more information about one such platform, Thales and Qoitech, have simplified smart power design and energy management by combining the Thales NB-IoT developer package and Otii measurement tool by Qoitech.

You can also watch our energy management video to learn how to maximise product longevity and get started with NB-IoT and Cat-M energy consumption measurements.

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August 28, 2020 at 09:10PM

CloudPassage

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Wed, 19 Aug 2020 01:55:23 +0000

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In Part 1 of our Shared Responsibility blog series, we provided a detailed overview to help you understand security in a public, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment. We broke down the infrastructure stack, explained the responsibilities taken by the cloud service…

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In Part 1 of our Shared Responsibility blog series, we provided a detailed overview to help you understand security in a public, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment. We broke down the infrastructure stack, explained the responsibilities taken by the cloud service provider, and where you retain ownership over security. We also discussed how the shared responsibility model affects members of your team and changes the way you think about security as you move your workloads to the cloud. In this installment, we’ll dive deeper into shared responsibility model automation and the important role cloud security tools play in securing your complex, modern infrastructure at scale.

Meeting the Demands of Shared Responsibility Model Automation

Let’s quickly re-visit the shared responsibility model chart from Part 1. The sum total of your security ownership across each of your connected cloud environments is determined by your provider contract and the services you’ve chosen to use. Your first step is to define a strategy and choose tools that can handle the unique security requirements of each of your server-based and serverless instances, along with securing your on-premises bare-metal servers and virtual environments.

Figure 1. Division of duties in a shared responsibility security model

Regardless of where your contract with your provider draws the line, your security posture in a shared responsibility model depends on your ability to standardize and maintain security orchestration, action, and response across your entire infrastructure, including:

  • Asset discovery, interrogation, and inventory monitoring
  • Continuous inventory updates
  • Vulnerability and exposure management, including network and privileged access configuration
  • Integrity and drift monitoring
  • Indication of compromise, threat detection, and security event management
  • Network security configuration and management
  • Compliance management and continuous compliance monitoring

Eight Key Attributes for Shared Security Model Automation

Effective cloud management unifies your security responsibilities on a single platform and provides shared responsibility model automation controls and compliance across all of your servers, containers, IaaS, and PaaS in any public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment. Your security solution should encompass the following eight key attributes in order to provide complete, effective, and efficient security:

1. Unified: Traditional security tools often don’t meet the needs of the various and unique needs of a complex, shared responsibility cloud security environment. Without a unified security solution, you end up tying together several different tools, which can lead to operational complexity, unnecessary redundancy, and potential gaps in coverage. A security platform built specifically for the cloud gives you a comprehensive set of configurable tools and the flexibility you need to close your gaps, improve your security posture, and adapt as your infrastructure grows and changes.

2. Automated: As your environment grows in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of all the various, moving parts. Shared responsibility model automation provides dependable speed and consistency, and frees up staff time to focus on strategic goals rather than repetitive tasks. Your security automation platform should automate asset discovery and monitoring, and should automatically deploy sensors when a new service, environment, or application is created. You’ll also need integration with your DevOps tools to automatically fail builds when new vulnerabilities might be introduced, assign new issues automatically, and monitor the development pipeline for remediation. With comprehensive, shared responsibility model automation in place, you can centralize and simplify your security integration and operations across systems and solutions that have different security concerns. An automated security platform also enables security to shift left into the development process, and empowers the adoption of a true DevSecOps culture.

3. Portable: With the rate of change we experience in technology, it’s no longer an option to say “no” to a better solution when it comes along. Everything about your application infrastructure, from the code you write to the containers you configure to security, needs to be portable. When moving a workload or application between clouds, your share of the shared responsibilities may change. Your security solution needs to work seamlessly across any public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment while requiring as few changes as possible during lift-and-shift operations.

4. Comprehensive: Your share of the shared responsibility model includes a wide range of requirements, including asset discovery, inventory, assessment, remediation, threat detection, microsegmentation, traffic discovery, and continuous compliance. If you have separate tools for each of those security domains, you’re setting yourself up for operational headaches and worse–the very real potential for introducing blind spots and gaps. A comprehensive security tool not only covers each of these requirements, but automates as much of the security management as possible to alleviate your operational burdens.

5. Fast: Everything about the cloud boils down to speed. CI/CD pipelines delivering microservices and features to the cloud in real time increase the demand for fast, integrated security. Your solution cannot slow that process or get in the way of your development team’s ability to deliver. Instead, your solution should provide high-speed deployment, telemetry, and analytics that keep up with the speed of DevOps.

6. Integrated: The problem with legacy security solutions is that they tend to “bolt on” to cloud environments, rather than working seamlessly within your instances, applications, and workloads. These non-cloud-based solutions increase manual tasks and complicate monitoring. A built-in security solution that integrates directly with cloud infrastructures ensures consistency and compliance with no extra effort. Your security platform should also be built into your application stack, rather than added on after the fact. An API based, embedded security foundation, integrated as part of your DevOps process and workflows, allows you to scale your security implementation up and out as needed and in parallel with your growth without becoming a bottleneck for the CI/CD pipeline.

7. Scalable: While nothing is truly infinite, cloud resources are about as close as you can get. Unlike a bare-metal data center, when you run up against the limits of your current cloud infrastructure, you simply ask for more, and it’s there. That means your security solution must scale automatically and instantaneously to keep up with fast-breaking, dynamic cloud changes. But you don’t always scale up. Cloud resources also provide a valuable opportunity to use resources as needed, and then release them when demand drops. This elastic scalability should be mirrored in your security platform so that you only use what you need in real time.

8. Cost-effective: Cloud architectures offer right-sized, pay-as-you go and usage-based pricing, which means you can control your costs while maximizing the value of your investment. Your cloud security solution should follow the same model. Security solutions that are built specifically for the cloud should provide pricing options that mirror those offered by the cloud provider, and that scale with the resources you use.

CloudPassage Halo is Shared Responsibility Model Automation That’s Built for the Cloud

Continuous monitoring and visibility across your cloud environments and into your data center, and across every environment is critical for maintaining accountability for your defined and accepted portions of the shared responsibility model. CloudPassage Halo provides a broad range of security controls that simplify shared responsibility model automation, with seamless integration between your DevOps pipeline and AWS and Azure cloud services.

Shared Responsibility Automation with Halo

Figure 2. CloudPassage Halo is shared responsibility model automation across any mix of environments

Halo provides seamless shared responsibility model automation across every environment

The ability to consolidate security onto a single platform simplifies operational processes and provides a foundation for automation. Halo provides cloud computing security and compliance in any public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment. Rather than managing separate tools, Halo gives you continuous monitoring, automatic indication of compromise in the cloud, visualization of network traffic, and automated compliance management across IaaS services, virtual and bare-metal servers, containers, and Kubernetes environments.

Halo addresses the diversity and flexibility of hybrid cloud

With Halo, you can implement security controls across all your cloud applications, environments, and containers quickly and efficiently. With microagents and registry connectors that monitor and evaluate server and container infrastructure, across your cloud environments and in the data center, Halo is a single, unified platform that centralizes security management while decreasing complexity. Through bi-direction REST APIs, Halo allows you to automate security, settings, and policies. You can also export, import, and manage security policies using version control systems, and automatically enforce security policies throughout your CI/CD workflows based on pre-established rules and standards. These controls allow you to catch and remediate potential vulnerabilities before they become security gaps.

Halo delivers effortless, automatic security scalability

Halo’s distributed architecture offloads processing and automates security configuration controls, which means you can ensure compliance without impacting performance. By design, Halo maintains security coverage through infrastructure and application scaling. Once you’ve defined your security policies, you can also introduce new assets quickly, without additional configuration. And Halo’s on-demand licensing model means your security implementation always matches your application footprint.

Halo automates security policies across DevOps processes and workflows

Shared responsibility model automation allows your DevOps teams a secure path to self-service environment creation and rapid deployment. Whether your DevOps teams are spinning up new servers or your automated workflows are running builds, tests, and deployments, Halo’s developer SDK and toolkit, plugins for Jenkins, and automatic ingest of IaaS metadata help enforce security coverage through automation for your code repositories, build processes, and your DevOps toolkit. At each step in the CI/CD pipeline, Halo assesses changes and provides feedback on automated alerts to address potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations before they become production security events.

Halo accelerates the path to compliance

Regulatory compliance is a never-ending challenge, requiring a team of knowledgeable professionals who stay up to date with industry changes and how those changes affect your particular company. Shared responsibility model automation is key to helping your compliance team maintain control over your growing cloud environment. Halo provides over 20,000 pre-configured rules and more than 150 policy templates that cover standards, including PCI, CIS, HIPPA, SOC, and more, and provides automated remediation when deviations are detected. And with a single, easy to navigate dashboard and fully customizable reporting, complete with automated notifications, your team can maintain a pulse on compliance across your dynamic cloud environment in real time. With Halo, you’ll break free from the ad-hoc emails and meetings for vulnerability communications, and you’ll skip the fire drills before audit. Instead, with continuous monitoring and shared responsibility model automation, you’ll know your state of compliance in real time, and will be ready when audit time comes.

Halo: The Only Unified Solution for Shared Responsibility Model Automation

Halo is the only battle-tested, unified solution built for addressing the needs of shared responsibility for AWS and Azure. With an emphasis on thorough, effective automation, Halo is especially valuable when it comes to defining, managing, and monitoring security across your multi-cloud environment. Automation reduces operational complexity and the potential for human error while reserving the time, resources, and energy of your team for ongoing product development efforts.

Ready to experience Halo for yourself? Claim your full-access 15-day free trial. If you need more help or have specific questions or testing objectives, don’t hesitate to contact us to speak with a cloud security expert.

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Thu, 13 Aug 2020 18:01:30 +0000

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Cloud service providers adhere to a shared security responsibility model, which means your security team maintains some responsibilities for security as you move applications, data, containers, and workloads to the cloud, while the provider takes some responsibility, but not all….

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Cloud service providers adhere to a shared security responsibility model, which means your security team maintains some responsibilities for security as you move applications, data, containers, and workloads to the cloud, while the provider takes some responsibility, but not all. Defining the line between your responsibilities and those of your providers is imperative for reducing the risk of introducing vulnerabilities into your public, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Shared Responsibility Varies by Provider and Service Type

In a traditional data center model, you are responsible for security across your entire operating environment, including your applications, physical servers, user controls, and even physical building security. In a cloud environment, your provider offers valuable relief to your teams by taking on a share of many operational burdens, including security. In this shared responsibility model, security ownership must be clearly defined, with each party maintaining complete control over those assets, processes, and functions they own. By working together with your cloud provider and sharing portions of the security responsibilities, you can maintain a secure environment with less operational overhead.

Defining the lines in a shared responsibility model

The key to a successful security implementation in a cloud environment is understanding where your provider’s responsibility ends, and where yours begins. The answer isn’t always clear-cut, and definitions of the shared responsibility security model can vary between service providers and can change based on whether you are using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (Paas):

  • In the AWS Shared Security model, AWS claims responsibility for “protecting the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services.”
  • Microsoft Azure claims security ownership of “physical hosts, networks, and data centers.” Both AWS and Azure state that your retained security responsibilities depend upon which services you select.

While the wording is similar, shared responsibility agreements leave much open for discussion and interpretation. But there are always some aspects of security that are clearly owned by the provider and others that you will always retain. For the services, applications, and controls between those ownership layers, security responsibilities vary by cloud provider and service type. In a multi-cloud environment, these variations in ownership introduce complexity and risk. Each environment, application, and service requires a unique approach for security assessment and monitoring. However, your overall security posture is defined by your weakest link. If you have a gap in coverage in any one system, you increase vulnerability across the entire stack and out to any connected systems.

A vendor-agnostic look at shared responsibility

The following diagram provides a high-level, vendor-agnostic view of a shared responsibility model based on concepts, rather than service level agreements. When entering into a discussion with a cloud provider, security needs to be included upfront in the decision-making process regarding shared responsibilities. You can use this guide to inform your discussion and to understand your roles and responsibilities in securing your cloud implementation.

Shared Responsibility Model Diagram Vendor Agnostic

Figure: A vendor-agnostic view of the division of responsibilities in the shared responsibility model

Your Share of Cloud Security Responsibilities

Whether in the data center, or using a server-based IaaS instance, serverless system, or a PaaS cloud service, you are always responsible for securing what’s under your direct control, including:

  • Information and Data: By retaining control over information and data, you maintain how and when your data is used. Your provider has zero visibility into your data, and all data access is yours to control by design.
  • Application Logic and Code: Regardless of how you choose to spin up cloud resources, your proprietary applications are yours to secure and control throughout the entire application lifecycle. This includes securing your code repositories from malicious misuse or intrusion, application build testing throughout the development and integration process, ensuring secure production access, and maintaining security of any connected systems.
  • Identity and Access: You are responsible for all facets of your identity and access management (IAM), including authentication and authorization mechanisms, single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), access keys, certificates, user creation processes, and password management.
  • Platform and Resource Configuration: When you spin up cloud environments, you control the operating environment. How you maintain control over those environments varies based on whether your instances are server based or serverless. A server-based instance requires more hands-on control over security, including OS and application hardening, maintaining OS and application patches, etc. In essence, your server-based instances in the cloud behave similar to your physical servers, and function as an extension of your datacenter. For serverless resources, your provider’s control plane gives you access to the setup of your configuration, and you are responsible for knowing how to configure your instance in a secure manner.

Additionally, you maintain responsibility for securing everything in your organization that connects with the cloud, including your on-premises infrastructure stack and user devices, owned networks, and applications, and the communication layers that connect your users, both internal and external, to the cloud and to each other. You’ll also need to set up your own monitoring and alerting for security threats, incidents, and responses for those domains that remain under your control. These responsibilities are yours whether you are running on AWS, Azure, or any other public cloud provider’s systems.

Understanding the Gray Areas of the Shared Responsibility Model

Based on whether you are running an IaaS or PaaS implementation, you may retain additional security responsibilities, or your provider may take some of that burden off your team. The line between your responsibility and those of your cloud vendor is dependent upon selected services and the terms of those services.

In the case of server-based instances, you often assume full responsibility of:

  • Identity and Directory Infrastructure: Whether you’re using OS-level identity directories like Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP on Linux, or you opt for a third-party identity directory solution, the security configuration and monitoring of that system is yours to control in an IaaS cloud implementation.
  • Applications: Server-based cloud environments, much like on-premises hosts, are a blank slate for installing and maintaining applications and workloads. You may run PaaS applications on your cloud servers, in which case you might be relieved of some of the security burden. However, any application or workload you move from your data center to a server-based instance in the cloud is solely your responsibility to secure.
  • Network Controls: Your provider only maintains the network that’s directly under their control. All networking above the virtualization layer—whether physical or infrastructure-as-code—requires your security configuration and monitoring.
  • Operating System: With server-based instances, you get to choose your OS and patch levels. While this allows you greater flexibility, it also means greater responsibility when it comes to security. You’ll need to keep up with current vulnerabilities, security patches, and environment hardening exercises to keep your server-based cloud resources secured.

When you choose a serverless environment or PaaS solutions, you do alleviate some of the security burden. Serverless solutions provide a control plane for configuration, and you are responsible for configuring that service in a secure manner. For example, in a serverless environment, you may have the opportunity to choose an operating system (typically Microsoft or Linux), but your provider maintains responsibility of the OS patching and security management in that environment. Serverless environments typically provide some management of the physical implementation of your identity and directory infrastructure, applications, and network controls as well, but you are still responsible for properly configuring access management through the control plane.

Responsibilities Always Owned by Your Cloud Service Provider

While it may seem that you retain a significant share of security responsibilities, your provider does alleviate much of your burden. Cloud vendors maintain 100% of control over the security of:

  • The Virtualization Layer: By controlling the provisioning of physical resources through virtualization, providers ensure segmentation and isolation of CPU, GPU, storage and memory to protect your users, applications, and data. This layer of abstraction acts as both a gateway and a fence, allowing access to provisioned resources, and protecting against potential misuse or malicious intrusion, both from the user environments, down, and the physical layer, up.
  • Physical Hosts, Network and Datacenter: Cloud vendors protect their hardware through a variety of both software and physical means. Large cloud providers like AWS and Azure protect their servers from physical intrusion and tampering through a variety of protocols, and they also ensure rapid failover and high availability with comprehensive, built-in backup, restore, and disaster recovery solutions.

The Shared Responsibility Model in Practice

When speaking of “shared responsibility,” it’s important to understand that you and your cloud provider never share responsibility for a single aspect of security operations. The areas of ownership you control are yours alone, and your provider does not dictate how you secure your systems. Likewise, you have no control over how the provider secures their portions of the application and infrastructure stack. You do, however, have the ability and right to access your cloud vendor’s audit reports to verify that their systems are secure and that they are adhering to your terms of service. Cloud providers publish these reports regularly and freely, and the most current reports are accessible at all times.

How the shared responsibility model impacts your developers

Cloud services offer convenient, automated environment provisioning, allowing developers and test groups to spin up servers through self-service processes. These environments, however beneficial for innovative potential, are often connected to your production assets and can pose significant security risks if not properly configured. While the cloud is inherently secure from the provider’s perspective, a secure cloud requires proper configuration and diligent access management. Gartner states the misconfiguration accounts for 99% of cloud security failures. For would-be hackers, cloud development and testing environments that are set up without enforcing proper security policies can become a gateway into your production systems or proprietary code storage. This means that identity and access management and environment configuration management must be closely managed, sometimes at the expense of unfettered convenience. Centralized, automated access management and policy-driven environment creation are critical for the success of your cloud security implementation.

Securing the DevOps pipeline

Cloud applications, powered by an automated CI/CD pipeline and driven by a DevOps organization, accelerate the speed at which your business delivers new applications and features. Unfortunately, that also means your DevOps pipeline can inadvertently and rapidly introduce security vulnerabilities without proper consideration and management. In a shared responsibility model, you are responsible for securing your code and the tools you use to deliver applications to the cloud. The servers and serverless assets that make up your DevOps toolchain must be protected, including code repositories, Docker image registries, Jenkins orchestration tools, etc. Beyond securing your CI/CD pipeline, you can—and should—leverage CI/CD automation processes to shift security left, by integrating security into the code and making it part of the build. This idea of “shifting left” means automated testing against clearly defined security requirements, early and often in the development process, so that new vulnerabilities are caught and remediated before being merged into the larger code tree or introduced into a production service.

Shared responsibility and configuration management

The speed and ease of configuring software-defined infrastructure opens your company up to new levels of agility and adaptability. However, the ability to reconfigure resources on the fly can also have instantaneous and broad-reaching consequences. The potential for misconfiguration can lead to security vulnerabilities. Your operations team needs to work closely with security to maintain policy-based control over how and when your cloud resources are provisioned. Your security teams are also accountable for monitoring resource management in the cloud for potential vulnerabilities. Through scripting, automation, and carefully planned self-service workflows, your configuration management and security teams can work together to give your company controlled, secure access to the cloud resources they need without becoming a bottleneck.

Compliance management, threat management, and visibility into the cloud

Regardless of where your security responsibilities end and your cloud provider’s responsibilities start, compliance with your organizational standards and required regulatory boards is your company’s responsibility. Centralized security orchestration, automation, and response allows you to collect and analyze data across your entire infrastructure, including your on-premises systems, public, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and out to your edge and endpoints. With the right security platform in place, your teams gain deep visibility that allows you to analyze and respond to threats and maintain compliance, often without human involvement.

Shared Responsibility Model Next Steps

Any time your cloud provider takes on a portion of security responsibility, it becomes one less concern for your organization. Clearly defined shared responsibilities allow you to focus your efforts on your application delivery strategy without overburdening your teams with day-to-day operational concerns in the physical layer. A security platform that unifies and automates security controls from the data center and across each cloud simplifies security management and minimizes risk. Centralized control and configuration of the provider control plane, hosting, and orchestration for containers, applications, and workloads further improves coverage of your environment from end to end.

Read Part 2 of this two-part series, “Shared Responsibility Model Automation: Automating your Share” to learn how you can gain better control of your public, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

If you’re not subscribed to our blog, be sure to sign up now. And as always, if you’d like to discuss the needs of your specific environment, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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Wed, 24 Jun 2020 04:10:17 +0000

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CloudPassage is officially announcing new packaging and pricing options for its award-winning Halo cloud security platform, effective immediately. These new options give more companies the ability to put Halo’s proven capabilities to work in a wider range of deployment scenarios…

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CloudPassage is officially announcing new packaging and pricing options for its award-winning Halo cloud security platform, effective immediately.

These new options give more companies the ability to put Halo’s proven capabilities to work in a wider range of deployment scenarios with even better economics.

If you are an existing CloudPassage customer, contact your account manager or customer success representative to learn how you can take advantage of these opportunities.

This article will cover our new subscription offerings, the drivers for the changes, and the economic advantages of the Halo pricing model. Here is a summary with select links if you want to jump to a specific section.

Two Halo Platform Editions

  • Halo Essentials: New for small to mid-sized cloud deployments
  • Halo Enterprise: Rate reduction for enterprises needing to reduce costs and consolidate on a single, unified cloud security platform

Flexible Subscription Options

  • Flex Licensing: New for companies wanting volume discounts without having to precisely model future usage
  • Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG): New for companies not able to make a contractual commitment to new vendors at this time
  • AWS Marketplace Private Offers: New for those that prefer purchasing through the AWS marketplace or participate in the AWS Enterprise Agreement program

Special Onboarding Offers

Additional Economic Advantages of Halo

  • Usage-based Licensing: So you only pay for what you use, whenever and wherever you use it
  • Simple, Transparent, and Predictable: To stay within budget constraints
  • No Hidden Costs or Extra Fees: To prevent unexpected budget overruns

Why We Are Making These Changes

As the first mover in cloud workload security, CloudPassage has maintained a unique perspective on how the market category has evolved. Public cloud computing adoption by mainstream and mid-size enterprises has been accelerating for some time. This trajectory has surged in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting shift to remote-working models.

The economic impacts of COVID-19 will not be short-lived. We’ve barely begun to understand how our day-to-day activities will change and how a completely new way of living and working will impact how businesses operate. And the pandemic itself has not run its course. In this fog of uncertainty, there are two tenets that have already been recognized broadly:

  • Cloud-centric technology strategies are critical for pandemic preparedness. Companies across the board are aggressively accelerating cloud adoption plans, both to mitigate the current crisis and prepare for the next one.
  • Spending discipline is tighter than ever and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Technology owners are under enormous pressure to reduce costs, negotiate more flexible purchasing terms, and consolidate products to maximize investment value.

The surge in cloud adoption has driven a surge in our conversations with enterprise InfoSec leaders who are struggling. Most relate stories about being crushed by accelerated cloud security plans on top of existing security requirements—all while budgets and staff are being cut and attacks are on the rise.

The demands to get more done, faster, with less is an extremely intense set of constraints to meet. Security leaders and architects see the value of a unified, automated, rapidly deployable platform in times like this. But financial lock-down policies and personnel constraints leave them unable to move on a mission-critical solution.

We’ve heard you and understand your struggles. Here’s what we’re doing to help put enterprise-class cloud security automation in your hands.

Introducing Halo Essentials

We’ve heard chilling statements like this one quite a lot recently:

“My budget is extremely limited but I am terrified that our cloud environment has glaring holes… our business might not survive a compromise right now.”

There are a lot of reasons for this fear. Workloads are being shifted from datacenters to clouds rapidly to eliminate the need for physical plant and hardware management. Workloads already in the cloud are being moved between clouds to seek lower IaaS costs. Less expensive development and operations contractors are being onboarded quickly, which introduces risk. Product release schedules are being accelerated to drive more revenue. It’s a panicky environment. The opportunity for misconfigurations and other exposure is more significant in a “do more with less” environment unless you’re properly protected.

Pricing

Halo Essentials is a new package that automates cloud workload risk awareness with a price point that is friendly to extreme budget constraints. It’s made to support teams with limited budgets who need to get the basics done quickly and easily in small to midsize cloud environments. Here are the numbers:

  • Security for AWS and Azure accounts* starts at $150 monthly per account on a prepaid basis, including unlimited account services and resources
  • Security for Linux and Windows servers starts at 3¢ per server-hour on a prepaid basis, regardless of server size or hosting environment (cloud instances, traditional VMs, bare-metal hosts)
  • Security for Docker hosts starts at 10¢ per host-hour on a prepaid basis, including securing the host itself, unlimited container launch monitoring, and automatic scanning of instantiated images (supports generic Docker hosts, Kubernetes nodes, ECS instances, etc)
  • Volume and term commitment discounts include discounts of up to 65% based on subscription volume and term commitment

* Halo CSPM support for GCP is in progress and will be released in Q3 2020

What is Included

Security and compliance posture assessment and monitoring for IaaS, server-based, and containerized environments in any mix of public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. Explicit remediation advice and ongoing security posture monitoring are included, and there are no hidden fees or extras to install or manage.

Learn more about Halo Essentials

Reduced Rates for Halo Enterprise

Another discussion that’s coming up often starts out with something like this:

“I am being told that I have to consolidate products and I’m getting heavy pressure to go with the cheapest thing out there. I’m already dependent on automation and need more, but the cheap products don’t have strong automation…. that’s going to backfire big-time since I don’t have the personnel to fill the automation gap.”

InfoSec teams are being asked to make security tooling cheaper and easier. DevOps teams are under pressure too, and they want less to deal with—fewer agents, fewer static reports, a smaller toolset. Large-scale environments still need enterprise-class automation, scale, and flexibility but they’re under financial pressure as well.

Pricing

We’ve reduced rates on Halo Enterprise to help large organizations get more and better cloud security automation in a single platform with fewer moving parts. Halo Enterprise has not been downscaled—it’s the same platform that top cloud enterprises have depended on for years. We’ve just found technical and operational efficiencies that enable us to offer better economics to our customers. Here are the numbers:

  • Security for AWS and Azure accounts* now starts at $180 monthly per account, including unlimited account services and resources
  • Security for Linux and Windows servers now starts at 4¢ per server-hour, regardless of server size or hosting environment (cloud instances, traditional VMs, bare-metal hosts)
  • Security for Docker hosts starts at 14¢ per host-hour, including securing the host itself, unlimited container launch monitoring, automatic scanning of instantiated images (supports generic Docker hosts, Kubernetes nodes, ECS instances, etc), and scanning of images at-rest in registries or in-motion via CD pipelines
  • Volume and term commitment discounts include discounts of up to 65% based on subscription volume and term commitment

* Halo support for GCP is in progress and will be released in Q3 2020

What is Included

Halo Enterprise still offers a broad range of cloud workload security automation that works in any public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud hosting environment with a single pane of glass. Capabilities include asset discovery and inventory, security assessment, ongoing security posture monitoring, threat detection, microsegmentation, and continuous compliance for IaaS, server-based, and containerized application environments.

Learn more about Halo Enterprise

Flex Licensing Subscriptions

Many security organizations simply can’t predict how many workloads of various types they will need, or have a fixed budget that they need to deploy and redeploy with flexibility:

“We have no idea how many cloud servers or containers we have today, and we expect those numbers to continue shifting. We’d rather set a monthly budget and use it fluidly as our needs dictate.”

Flex Licensing Subscriptions have you covered. In the Flex licensing model, your unit discounts are based on the volume of your fixed monthly budget. Use your discounted Halo service units each month however you need to, and they’re charged against your monthly pool of usage dollars. You can deploy Halo to new infrastructure, decommission old infrastructure, and even move licensing at will—and you don’t even need to contact us to do it. Flex Licensing allows you to stick to a fixed monthly budget, even if you can’t predict what’s coming.

Contact us to learn more about Flex Licensing Subscriptions

Pay-as-you-Go (PAYG) Subscriptions

Some companies we’re talking with have the need for Halo right now, but absolutely cannot make a contractual commitment to a new vendor:

“I have some discretionary budget to go month-to-month but there’s no way procurement is going to let me sign a contract with a commitment to anything new.”

If you’re in this situation, you’re not alone. This situation is happening everywhere, and it’s frustrating to see a solution to a need that you can’t touch. We get it.

Halo Pay-as-you-Go (PAYG) subscriptions enable you to access Halo’s capabilities without a commitment. Available from the AWS Marketplace, subscriptions under the PAYG model allow you to pay for exactly the Halo security services that you use each month with no contractual commitment—cancel anytime without penalty or effort.

Learn more about Halo PAYG

AWS Marketplace Private Offers

The AWS Marketplace private offer feature enables you to negotiate product pricing, terms, and conditions that are not listed by a vendor on the AWS Marketplace.

CloudPassage now supports procurement of Halo through private offers. CloudPassage creates a private offer based on agreed-upon pricing and terms, which appears in the AWS account that you designate. You accept the private offer and start receiving the negotiated price and terms of use.

In addition to making procurement simpler, this can be financially beneficial for enterprises that participate in the AWS Enterprise Agreement program. Under some AWS Enterprise Agreements, AWS customers receive discounts based on the total amount spent with AWS. Software purchased through the AWS Marketplace can provide credit towards achieving higher AWS spending levels and therefore higher AWS discounts.

Ask your procurement team if this opportunity exists in your enterprise and contact us to discuss a private offer for Halo through the AWS Marketplace.

Learn more about AWS Private Offers

Free Initial Onboarding and At-Cost Professional Services

Many companies we speak to recognize that once fully deployed, CloudPassage Halo requires little to no operational effort. The challenge is that they don’t even have the personnel bandwidth for initial Halo deployment:

“We need it, we want it, we know the automation will give our team relief… but we don’t even have time to set it up.”

We understand the conditions that teams are working under—reduced hours, furloughed team members, and even security teams being reassigned to non-security tasks.

Free Initial Onboarding for New Halo Deployments through 2020

Under normal circumstances, onboarding is provided for a fee—but today’s circumstances are far from normal. To help teams who need Halo up and running quickly, our customer success team will perform initial onboarding free of charge. This includes:

  • Setting up your Halo account
  • Structuring your hierarchical asset groups
  • Selecting the right policies for your environments
  • Setting up your IaaS connectors
  • Providing pre-populated microagent deployment scripts
  • Setting up user accounts
  • Configure reporting and alerting so that security, DevOps and system owners get the most critical information they need at the right frequency and in the right format
  • Orient all of your Halo administrators and users to our online training resources

Professional Services Provided At Cost through 2020

Many companies want to go beyond initial onboarding to gain deeper value from Halo’s automation capabilities. The challenge is again staffing—they just don’t have the bandwidth to engage.

We’re alleviating this challenge by providing all professional services at-cost for advanced Halo integrations like automatic issue routing, workflow tool integration (e.g. Jira, ServiceNow), and SIEM/GRC/SOAR integrations.

NOTE: Professional services projects will be scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis based on resource availability.

Contact us to learn more about free initial onboarding and at-cost professional services

Additional Economic Advantages of Halo

Our new pricing and packaging options improve Halo’s value for investment on top of the existing economic advantages that are gained. The following are some key considerations for those not familiar with Halo’s existing economic benefits.

Usage-based Subscriptions

Many products bind licenses to factors like specific users, IP addresses, or specific IaaS accounts. Redeploying licenses with these products is often not permitted, even if the originally bound asset goes away. Products that do allow redeployment of licenses often have restrictions, require manual effort to deactivate and reactivate licenses, or even require that you contact the vendor to request changes. And very few products offer automatic on-demand licensing, discounted or not. These limitations result in lost budget dollars, plain and simple.

Halo is purely usage-based and all licensing is transparently portable. You can provision, deprovision, and move licensed services automatically. It’s simple—if you turn Halo on or off for an environment, the licensing takes care of itself. You don’t need to do anything extra, and you can see your usage at any time.

Halo’s usage-based subscription structures also have built-in volume discount tiers that apply to prepaid or “reserved” service units as well as on-demand service units. This enables you to pay for exactly what you need while maximizing discount opportunities and use discounted on-demand service to address variable requirements.

Simple, Transparent, and Predictable

Some products charge based on bandwidth, data ingest and storage, scans run, or even each time a rule is evaluated. Others charge different prices based on the size of workloads or hosting environment. The list goes on. This makes it extremely hard to predict costs, leading to frequent budget overruns.

Halo’s licensing model is simple and transparent, which leads to predictability. We charge based on the number of IaaS accounts and workloads, period. Maximize your discounts by committing to the steady-state workloads you need, and use discounted on-demand services for variable needs like intermittent autoscaling or planned seasonal capacity changes.

No Hidden Costs or Extra Fees

Some products “nickel-and-dime” customers with extra fees for things that should be included, like compliance rules, API access, or single sign-on integration. Some also advertise as SaaS solutions, but actually require the deployment of additional infrastructure—often a lot of additional infrastructure—for scanning appliances, data aggregators, and similar requirements. Not only do these extras cost hard dollars for licensing and infrastructure, but they increase operational costs since they need to be operated and maintained.

Halo is a true all-inclusive SaaS solution that has no requirements that drive extra costs for you. Halo’s architecture does not need intermediate collectors to scale and API connectors are operated from the Halo cloud environment. Halo also does not charge extra for items like compliance analytics, ad-hoc scans, or API connectors.

Learn More About Halo

Our goal with these sweeping changes is to make Halo’s powerful capabilities available to more companies and to help address the unprecedented challenges our industry is facing. We’re striving to deliver a superior, enterprise-class solution that’s unified, comprehensive, automated, and portable with even better economics and flexibility.

To learn more about CloudPassage and Halo, here are some helpful links:

The post New Halo Subscription Options appeared first on CloudPassage.

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Thu, 18 Jun 2020 00:17:14 +0000

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The “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019” report provides an excellent overview of the security challenges posed by cloud computing and the solutions best poised to address cloud workload protection. In this fourth blog post of our series on…

The post Scalable Cloud Workload Security: Part 4 of a Series appeared first on CloudPassage.

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The “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019” report provides an excellent overview of the security challenges posed by cloud computing and the solutions best poised to address cloud workload protection. In this fourth blog post of our series on the Forrester Wave, we explore two more criteria for which CloudPassage Halo received the highest scores possible, “Scalability: protected cloud instances” and “Scalability: protected containers.” We will share our thoughts on what scalable cloud workload security means, why it’s important, and why we believe CloudPassage received 5 out of 5 in these two criteria.

Enterprises want the speed and scalability offered by cloud infrastructure but often cite security and compliance as primary inhibitors of adoption. To eliminate these inhibitors, cloud workload security solutions require the same automatic, transparent scalability of the cloud environments they protect. Forrester punctuated this need for scalable cloud workload security by recommending that buyers seek solutions capable of “scalable deployment of protection to a large number of workloads without interruption.”

Scalability becomes a key requirement for security operations as instantly scalable cloud infrastructure becomes the norm for application hosting.  Cloud environments can scale up rapidly and dramatically, which can easily overwhelm security solutions not designed for these kinds of operations. Cloud security platforms must be able to scale in lockstep and instantaneously secure new assets, and they must do it with zero operational overhead.

Let’s take a look at what “Scalable Cloud Workload Security” means and why it’s important.

What Scalable Cloud Workload Security is and Why it is Important

Cloud computing has become the new normal for enterprises as the benefits of IaaS are realized and scaled. Higher agility, faster and easier deployment, and scalability are just a few of these benefits. As cloud computing environments rapidly scale up and down automatically, security must be equally as scalable and automated to keep up with the rate of change. This is an extreme requirement that cannot be fulfilled by legacy security tools and approaches built for a different time.

Security and compliance stakeholders must recognize two key dimensions of scalability that cloud security solutions must address as their enterprise clouds grow:

  • Short-term cloud scaling operations (e.g. cloudbursting, autoscaling, microservice orchestration) require security capabilities that can scale as rapidly as the servers, containers, and IaaS resources they protect.
  • Long-term cloud growth as more enterprise workloads migrate to IaaS require security capabilities that can grow without encountering technical, operational, or economic limitations.

Clearly there’s a need for scalable cloud workload security solutions that can automatically adjust their scale to keep pace with the underlying cloud infrastructure.

How scalability can challenge cloud security and compliance

One of the great advantages of cloud infrastructure is the ability to size infrastructure iteratively to address current and future needs. Projects can be deployed without large upfront costs or risky predictions, instead starting at limited scale and adding “just-in-time” resources as growth dictates. As enterprises see pockets of early success with cloud infrastructure, every business unit will want to reap the benefits.

The ability to create and scale nearly instantly brings many benefits but creates challenges for security and compliance. Here are some of the most common challenges that we’ve built Halo to address.

Legacy tools can’t keep up with technical cloud scale

The technical characteristics of cloud infrastructure are markedly different from traditional datacenter hosting environments. Legacy tools were built under a different set of assumptions and premises that leaves them unable to function well, if at all, in cloud computing environments. Many of these challenges are directly related to scale.

For example, a single data center server is often redeployed as multiple smaller server instances in IaaS, core to the concept of cloud computing’s horizontal scalability. This means there are more individual operating systems, configurations, etc. to manage. In many cases cloud server instances are often ephemeral and are recycled far more frequently than traditional bare-metal hosts or virtual machines, creating more overhead for security tools. In addition, IP addresses change often in cloud environments, creating ripple effects on network-centric security tools and often breaking policies and other IP-centric control constructs. These are all changes that extract more processing and compute demands. Bottom line, there’s no place in the virtualized world of cloud computing for the hardware-based acceleration that traditional security tools depended upon to scale.

While these and other technical scalability factors cause legacy security tools to fail in cloud environments, they drive the successful cloud workload protection programs that are built on cloud-purposed solutions designed to address them.

Cloud security operations cannot scale without automation

There are also significant operational differences between legacy environments and cloud computing that drive the need for scalable cloud workload security. DevOps and continuous delivery, which go hand-in-hand with cloud infrastructure, can create serious security and compliance operational disruptions.

  • Cloud infrastructure is software-defined and instantly scalable, making the volume and speed of changes orders of magnitude greater than traditional environments.
  • Automation toolchains that implement continuous deployment amplify this new level of operational speed and scale.
  • DevOps teams are now often very autonomous and embedded within business units, meaning traditionally regimented operational processes are often eschewed.
  • The rapidly expanding universe of cloud services also drives operational challenges—the sheer number of diverse technologies that a central security organization must address is staggering.
  • Instrumenting cloud security components requires direct integration into infrastructure templates and build-time automation before security controls can even be deployed.

Automation is the lynchpin to successful execution in these diverse, distributed, and dynamic cloud environments.

Securing these environments also requires deep automation, as failure to adapt security operations to these new realities results in a dangerous inability to keep up. Success in these new environments requires cloud workload security platforms with the deep automation capabilities needed to enable operational scale.

Traditional collaboration doesn’t scale for distributed DevOps organizations

Scalability problems can come from surprising sources—even organizational shifts. The structured, one-to-one cooperation between centralized security and operations teams is gone, and the new one-to-many model can create massive scalability strain if not handled properly.

Traditional organizations were established with a central IT organization at their core with subunits specializing in development, hosting operations, security, end-user computing, and so on. This centralized structure often resulted in well-defined, disciplined operations enforced by central IT executive management, with its rules of engagement and associated expectations well-understood.

The advent of DevOps, supplanted this regimented machinery with many small DevOps teams, very often reporting into distributed business units with their own priorities. This results in central security organizations being forced to cast a new model for communication and collaboration without the luxury of common executive authority. The independent nature of DevOps means that every team can be dramatically different. That may require InfoSec to have an individual approach for successfully interacting with each one of them.

Gone are the days of sending emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets to system owners. For scalable cloud workload security, DevOps teams want collaboration to happen in-line with their existing tools and processes. Slow-moving legacy approaches to collaboration impact their operational speed, something that’s tolerated at best and rejected at worst. Cloud security platforms must be designed with this reality in mind and provide methods for InfoSec to deliver automatable data to DevOps teams within their existing tools and workflows.

With the cloud security importance and challenges in mind, we’ll turn to sharing our thoughts on Forrester’s assessment of the CloudPassage Halo platform and our scalable cloud workload security.

Why We Believe CloudPassage Received 5 out of 5 in Forrester’s Criteria for Cloud Instance and Container Security Scalability

CloudPassage was purpose-built in 2010 to automate security and compliance management for servers across public and hybrid cloud environments. Since that time, CloudPassage has invested heavily in the platform’s evolution to address new cloud technologies and their security needs.

Halo now addresses security for server-based, containerized, and IaaS/PaaS services across any mix of public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments.

Halo customer deployments range in scale from a single cloud stack with a few assets to thousands of development and production stacks with millions of assets. Our largest scaling event involved 40,000 servers per hour. Halo’s transparent scalability and comprehensive capabilities give you the ability to address rapidly emerging cloud security needs and prevent security from impeding progress. Halo is blazing fast, and its architecture is designed for transparent scalability that makes temporary scale-up operations automatic and long-term growth simple.

The Halo platform’s architecture combines auto-scaling microservices, batch processing, streaming data analytics, SQL and NoSQL data stores, and cloud object storage, and is hosted 100% in public IaaS.

Security analytics and orchestration environment

The core of the Halo platform is the Halo cloud, a security analytics and orchestration environment that performs security analysis, control orchestration, and compliance monitoring for millions of cloud assets simultaneously. The Halo cloud receives continuous telemetry, state, and event data from lightweight microagents and API connectors deployed across the user’s cloud environments.

Autoscaling microservices

Telemetry and scan payloads are processed by highly efficient, purpose-built, autoscaling microservices. Based on user configurations, Halo’s security microservices take actions such as generating scan findings, analyzing cloud security events, executing REST API commands, or triggering other security automation microservices to generate and deliver intelligence, orchestrate distributed control and policy updates, perform situationally-specific interrogation of assets cloud-wide, and more.

Patented command and control model

Halo monitors millions of cloud resources simultaneously using this patented “command-and-control” model. Halo automates many recurring and ad-hoc security operational tasks.

Automated deployment and workflows are required for scalable cloud workload security

Halo’s comprehensive automation builds security into the continuous deployment pipelines and automates workflows between security and development—critical for scalable cloud workload security.

Halo microagents and API connectors are designed for quick and easy deployment using existing automation tools. Halo microagents transparently support server autoscaling (a.k.a. “cloudbursting”), cloning, and migration between environments, and thus can support scalable cloud workload security.

Integration with existing automation tools is accomplished through the Halo REST API, recognized as the industry’s most complete fully bi-directional API. Through the API, Halo is able to fully integrate with leading infrastructure automation tools for easy implementation and automated operation.

The API can use data from Halo to open a ticket in ticketing tools such as Jira or ServiceNow, export data to common SIEMs, and create an Ansible playbook to remediate vulnerable packages.

This allows teams to implement frictionless security by enabling security, IT, and DevOps to integrate and automate security into DevOps processes and continuous deployment pipelines while fostering collaboration between InfoSec and development or DevOps.

Automatic application of policy controls

Another important aspect of scalable cloud workload security is how the security controls themselves support scalability. Halo unifies a broad range of security controls across servers, containers, and public cloud infrastructure. Halo provides more than 150 security policies with thousands of rules to cover various asset types, operating systems, common applications, and security best practices. These policies are assigned to groups, and when new assets within that group come online, they are automatically assessed based on the assigned policies, with no manual intervention.

Autoscaling and cloud-bursting support

Halo automatically deploys, configures, inventories, interrogates, assesses, and initiates monitoring of new servers and containers without user intervention, for server cloning and autoscaling. Halo:

  • Handles cloud-bursting and autoscaling events by automatically detecting and instrumenting, monitoring, and protecting new cloud assets as they come online
  • Retains information on ephemeral workloads as you scale back down for assets that were not long-lived

Scalable licensing model

Halo offers a subscription model that aligns with the subscription models of cloud security providers. The Halo licensing model is designed for dynamic cloud environments so that you pay for only what you need; it is:

  • Consumption-based with complete user flexibility in license allocation
  • Based on cloud assets protected to make budget forecasting predictable
  • On-demand when needed, with license bursting to address temporary infrastructure scale-up events transparently

Scalable Cloud Workload Security Conclusion

In summary, we believe Halo received the highest scores possible in both the “Scalability: protected cloud instances” and “Scalability: protected containers” criteria in the “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019″ report because the capabilities described above, when combined into one unified platform, support the following common characteristics of cloud adoption.

Organic application growth

The cloud infrastructure for a new application typically starts small and grows, often very quickly. With Halo:

  • DevOps teams can acquire only the infrastructure they need to get started, then grow their environment as application demand mounts.
  • As asset count grows and new application functionality is developed and deployed, every asset is automatically secured.
  • Security and compliance can grow along with organic application growth, easily and without disruption.

Viral cloud adoption

When larger enterprises see initial success with cloud computing, adoption will go viral as more business units will want to migrate or build greenfield applications to reap the benefits of the cloud. With Halo:

  • Security teams will not have to worry about the number of cloud environments or autonomous DevOps teams because Halo can automate instrumenting them for security.
  • Security teams can handle dramatic environment growth and organizational shift.

Autoscaling applications

One of the core benefits of cloud-based application infrastructure is the ability for application components to autoscale, but with autoscaling, the number of infrastructure assets in an application environment can multiply many times over. With Halo:

  • Autoscaling won’t require any manual effort to scale security tools in concert with the underlying environment.
  • Securing all assets associated with autoscaling events is transparent and automated.

To learn more about how Halo’s transparently scalable cloud workload security can help you secure your cloud infrastructure and assets:

Read our previous blogs on criteria for which CloudPassage received the highest scores possible in the “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019” report.

Subscribe to our Blog in the upper right corner of this page, so you don’t miss the next one on Centralized Agent Framework Plans.

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Wed, 22 Apr 2020 02:09:07 +0000

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Thank you for the great response at BSides San Francisco 2020, where we unveiled our real-time vulnerability alerting engine. By harnessing public data and applying data analytics, we cut through the noise and get real-time alerts only for highly seismic…

The post Dozen Dirtiest CVEs Q120 (Cloud Vulnerability Exposures) appeared first on CloudPassage.

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Thank you for the great response at BSides San Francisco 2020, where we unveiled our real-time vulnerability alerting engine. By harnessing public data and applying data analytics, we cut through the noise and get real-time alerts only for highly seismic cloud vulnerability exposures (CVEs)—making vulnerability fatigue a thing of the past. If you missed our BSidesSF 2020 talk, you can watch the video “Real-Time Vulnerability Alerting” on YouTube. The real-time vulnerability alerting engine has been humming and churning data since BSides, and here are the consolidated results for the dozen dirtiest CVEs Q120.

CVEs Q120

Overview of Q1 Vulnerabilities

The X-axis for this graph represents each day of the Q120, while the Y-axis represents the vulnerability intelligence quotient calculated by the engine (see the BSides presentation for more info). For simplicity, the Y-axis has been divided into four colors—Red, Orange, Yellow, and Green—which represent the dirtiness (or criticality) of each vulnerability. Each blue dot represents a vulnerability. Its placement on the X-axis represents the date on the timeline and placement on the Y-axis represents criticality (i.e. vulnerability intelligence quotient). It’s possible for the same vulnerability to appear on multiple days, especially vulnerabilities with a high X-axis value.

#1 Dirtiest CVE Q120 – CVE-2020-0601 (CurveBall)

The title for being the dirtiest CVE Q120 goes to CVE-2020-0601—a vulnerability discovered by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) that affects how cryptographic certificates are verified by cryptography libraries in Windows which makes up CryptoAPI. Dubbed “CurveBall”, an attacker exploiting this vulnerability could potentially create their own cryptographic certificates (signed with Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithms) that appear to originate from a legitimate certificate that is fully trusted by Windows by default. The Proof of Concept (POC) is available, and one of them can be found in GitHub here.

#2 – CVE-2020-0796 (EthernalDarkness/GhostSMB)

The second dirtiest CVE Q120 is CVE-2020-0796—also known as EthernalDarkness or GhostSMB. On March 10, this vulnerability was inadvertently shared, under the assumption that Microsoft was releasing a patch, which Microsoft released only after public details were available on March 12. This vulnerability would allow an unauthenticated attacker to exploit this issue by sending a specially crafted packet to a vulnerable SMBv3 server.  Similarly, if an attacker could convince or trick a user into connecting to a malicious SMBv3 server, then the user’s SMB3 client could also be exploited. Regardless if the target or host is successfully exploited, this would grant the attacker the ability to execute arbitrary code. Microsoft later released an out-of-band patch to fix the issue, and the POC for this issue can be found on GitHub here.

#3 – CVE-2019-19781

The honor of the third dirtiest CVE Q120 goes to CVE-2019-19781, which affects Citrix Gateway and Citrix Application Discovery Controller. Initially, it was thought to be just a directory traversal vulnerability that would allow a remote, unauthenticated user to write a file to a location on disk. But on further investigation, it was found that this vulnerability would allow full remote code execution on the host.

Top 12 Dirtiest CVEs Q120

The prioritized list of the complete dirty dozen for Q1 2020 is in the table below.

Priority

Vulnerability

Description

1

CVE-2020-0601 Windows Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates spoofing

2

CVE-2020-0796 Windows SMBv3 Client/Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

3

CVE-2019-19781 Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway RCE

4

CVE-2020-0688 Microsoft Exchange Memory Corruption Vulnerability

5

CVE-2020-0674 Microsoft Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability

6

CVE-2020-0609 Windows Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

7

CVE-2020-0610 Windows Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

8

CVE-2020-1938 Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) arbitrary file access

9

CVE-2019-11510 Pulse Secure Pulse Connect Secure arbitrary file reading vulnerability

10

CVE-2019-17026 Firefox and Thunderbird code execution

11

CVE-2019-0604 Microsoft SharePoint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

12

CVE-2019-18634 Linux  /etc/sudoers stack-based buffer overflow

How CloudPassage Halo Can Help

CloudPassage Halo Customers can use Halo’s Server Secure service, our software vulnerability manager, to identify and prioritize the dozen dirtiest CVEs Q120 lurking in their environments.

CVEs Q120 halo servers tab

CloudPassage Halo Servers Tab

Customers can also create custom reports to view details on the dozen dirtiest CVEs Q120.

CVEs Q120 Halo Vulnerability Report

CloudPassage Halo Vulnerability Report

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Tue, 14 Apr 2020 03:01:58 +0000

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As we mentioned in a previous blog, the “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019” report provided an excellent overview of the security challenges posed by cloud-based environments and the cloud workload security solutions best poised to address them based…

The post Containerization and Container Orchestration Platform Protection: Cloud Workload Security Part 3 appeared first on CloudPassage.

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As we mentioned in a previous blog, the “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019” report provided an excellent overview of the security challenges posed by cloud-based environments and the cloud workload security solutions best poised to address them based on 30 criteria. In this third blog post of our series, we explore the criterion “containerization and container orchestration platform protection.”

Public cloud computing caused a seismic shift in how application infrastructure was provisioned and managed. Soon after, another seismic shift opened up even more disruptive possibilities—workload containerization.

Today, containerized environments continue to evolve towards even greater levels of speed, flexibility, and dynamic operation. The challenge is they can be incredibly complex, especially in advanced use cases.

Solutions that provide container security must be able to address the broad set of tools typically in use, automation of change management, integration directly into continuous delivery pipelines, and scaling to handle hundreds of thousands to millions of container images and instances. The implementation of containerization and container orchestration platform protection is critical to cloud workload security.

About Containerization and Container Orchestration Platform Protection

In the key takeaways section of “The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019”, Forrester says “Support For Containerization And OS-Level Protection Are Key Differentiators” and describes the capability as follows:

“With Kubernetes and Docker becoming de facto container environments mainly deployed on cloud platforms, S&R professionals need to be sure that: 1) they scan container images pre-runtime and runtime; 2) there are controls for any configuration drifts at the container level; and 3) they monitor network communications and system calls among containers as well as between containers and the underlying host operating system. Other differentiators include vendor-supplied and constantly updated best practices and compliance templates as well as agentless and agent-based container architectures.”

We’ll start with our perspective on what these capabilities entail, why they’re important, and what security and compliance control objectives they can deliver.

What Is Containerization and Container Orchestration Platform Protection?

Containerization and container orchestration platform protection is a set of capabilities that integrate directly into the broad set of components that make up a containerized environment and automatically discover, inventory, assess, monitor, and control these components.

The scope of containerization and container orchestration platform protection capabilities typically includes:

  • Security for container images at-rest (stored in registries) and in-motion (moving through CI/CD pipelines)
  • Security for container runtimes (e.g., Docker) running on hosts, pre-configured clusters, container-as-a-service (e.g., AWS Elastic Container Service or Elastic Kubernetes Service) or runtime-as-a-service (e.g., AWS Lambda)
  • Security for container instances launched into runtimes (e.g., Azure Container Instances)
  • Security for underlying container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes or Mesos
  • Security for systems that support containerized environments, such as image registries, artifact servers, code repositories, and Jenkins hosts
  • Security for deployments across public, hybrid, and multi-cloud models

Secondary capabilities must include a range of protection capabilities not only for the containers themselves but also for the images and the runtimes, the ability to handle massive numbers of container images and instances, and the ability to implement “shift-left” strategies.

Capabilities to protect runtimes implemented as self-operated Docker hosts are particularly important to protect because:

  • All guest containers on a Docker host share that host’s operating system kernel and often other common components
  • The Docker host itself contains instrumentation with privileged access to the containers and other infrastructure (e.g., dockerd, kubectl), so if the Docker host itself is compromised, the entire environment is compromised.

For now, let’s consider why containerization and container orchestration platform protection is important and what security and compliance use cases it can address.

Why Containerization and Container Orchestration Platform Protection are Important

Containerization has revolutionized application infrastructure. Innovations in container platforms now deliver nearly unlimited portability, dynamic capacity management, and levels of operational automation never before possible. These environments continue to evolve towards even greater levels of speed, flexibility, and dynamic operation.

Effective container security requires tools with the same level of speed, flexibility, and dynamic operation. This means automation.

Below are some of the reasons why containerization and container orchestration platform protection are essential capabilities to have in the security and compliance arsenal.

Preventing a Security Incident from Becoming Viral

By now, we all know how quickly someone infected with a virus can expose a large number of other people in a short time.

Similarly, a vulnerable or otherwise dangerous container image can result in hundreds or thousands of exposed container instances in the normal course of the image being used.

Running containers are instantiated from static images, much like virtual machines from a virtual-machine image or AWS EC2 instances from AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). But containers can be instantiated even faster, leaving little to no opportunity for security intervention if an image contains dangerous code or has been subverted.

This speed means that a single bad image can expose entire application environments to attack almost instantly. This risk is compounded when other “child” container images are built on top of a bad container image.

Given that every single configuration change to a container creates another image, this results in a massive number of images (container image sprawl) that could expose the broader container environment. A large number of potentially bad containers being accessible for instantiation combined with the speed of their instantiation can lead to an explosion in attackable application surface area.

Preventing a viral security incident is just one of the many reasons why containerization and container orchestration platform protection is important.

Shifting Security To The Left By Making Security Tests Part Of The Build

Tremendous gains have been made in enabling continuous software delivery by applying the DevOps practice of shifting left.

In a software testing context shifting left means moving application testing and security earlier in the development process, which is important here because shifting security to the left is key to delivering quality software at speed—as it drives teams to start testing earlier in the pipeline and ultimately build security into software rather than bolting it on at the end.

To learn more about the concept of shifting left and its value—such as reducing the cost of fixing vulnerabilities by almost 10 times—read What is “Shift Left”? Shift Left Testing Explained – BMC Blogs.

Containerization, DevOps, and continuous delivery go hand in hand.

The key goals of DevOps are to speed up production and improve product quality. These make containerization a critical component of DevOps and continuous delivery, as it helps to increase the stability and reliability of applications and makes application management easier.

Containerization also directly supports continuous delivery pipeline infrastructure by easily integrating into existing processes. To learn more, read “Continuous infrastructure: The other CI.”

Continuous delivery of infrastructure depends on automated testing to ensure that the application and infrastructure it runs on behaves as expected: Within each stage, teams use quality gates to assess the quality level of an application. These are often referred to as “gates” since the tests have to run clean before the build can progress towards production—a failure is known as “breaking the build” and requires the owner of the changes (usually a DevOps engineer) to go back and fix what they broke.

This testing, or quality gates, is the reason why continuous delivery works well. You can focus on specific tests that will give you the fastest feedback—and with the right tooling, security can be made part of the build, ensuring that vulnerabilities never make it to production.

Achieving a shift-left posture by making security testing part of the build is a major reason why containerization and container orchestration platform protection capabilities are important.

Rapid DevOps Feedback

With traditional security approaches, such as vulnerability scanners, getting feedback to DevOps teams and other system owners takes a long time (days, weeks, even months).

Containerized environments often leverage continuous delivery and the related automated testing described process discussed above.

Making security part of the build through container orchestration platform protection capabilities creates a real-time feedback loop for system owners that’s part of their day-to-day workflow. Which means that security flaws introduced by system owners will be presented to them in real time, and they will have to fix them before moving to the next stage. This will also result in better education and far fewer security flaws making it to production.

Reducing Exposures, Vulnerability Windows, and Security Assurance Costs

Security problems are harder to fix once they’re in production. The further they get down the development pipeline, the more complicated and costly they are to fix. These difficulties result in more people and more time.

Waiting until an issue gets further into the production workflow also makes it take longer to be fixed, which means there’s a longer vulnerability window—that is, the exposure is in production for some period of time while it’s being fixed. Additionally, once the software is in testing phase, reproducing any defects on a developer’s local environment poses yet another time-consuming task.

Implementing processes for detecting early and often can be extremely valuable because it cuts down on the potential exponential costs of re-work and vulnerability remediation. With the right automation, continuous delivery methods enable reduction of exposures released into production, reduces vulnerability windows, and cuts the overall cost of security assurance for containerized environments.

This is a reason why containerization and container orchestration platform protection capabilities are essential to the effectiveness of these environments.>

Prevent Attacks On Runtime, Orchestration, and Registry Layers

The end-to-end protection of containers in production is also critical to avoiding the steep operational and reputational costs of potential data breaches.

While there’s myopic focus on the containers themselves, they’re just part of the equation.

Comprehensive runtime container security also requires securing orchestration systems, which may have vulnerabilities creating even more attack surfaces for malicious actors. Attackers who are able to penetrate runtimes or orchestration layers own the environments they host and/or manage.

Your entire container ecosystem is only as secure as its least secure container, and the security of that container is at least in part dependent on the registry from which you pulled the original container image.

Compromise of image registries would mean that the very source images used to build containerized applications is compromised. Imagine what they could do by sending out pre-compromised software.

These components are critical to protect in addition to the running containers themselves. Well-rounded containerization and container orchestration platform protection capabilities are essential for ensuring that applications are protected from attacks and exploits throughout as much of the build-ship-run lifecycle as possible.

Use Cases for Containerization and Container Orchestration Platform Protection

The simple ability to implement containerization and container orchestration platform protection is a far cry from automating a specific operational task at scale, across an environment.

In our experience working with hundreds of companies on cloud security, the most critical question to ask may be “What can I do with it?”

The following capabilities can address many use cases, too many to list here. The most common use cases in which control objectives are achieved with containerization and container orchestration platform protection include:

  • Continuous Asset Awareness – Automated, continuous discovery and inventory of IaaS services and resources. You can’t do any of the things below if you don’t know the assets exist.
  • Point-in-Time Security Assessment – Assessment of public cloud account security, including the IaaS account itself and the security of the services and assets inside the account
  • Continuous Security Monitoring – Ongoing IaaS environment monitoring to detect and evaluate how changes and events impact your security and compliance posture
  • Compliance Auditing & Monitoring – Point-in-time evaluation of compliance posture against a range of standards (a.k.a. pre-auditing), or continuous compliance monitoring to surface issues as they arise instead of “cleaning up” right before an audit.
  • Detect Indicators of Threat & Compromise – Attackers will use cloud technology to their advantage, leaving cloud “versions” of rootkits and other malicious artifacts as part of their attacks. With the right containerization and container orchestration platform protection automation, indicators of these situations are quickly detected to accelerate prevention, isolation, containment, investigation, and clean-up.
  • Automated Issue Remediation – Leveraging cloud provider APIs to implement automatic remediation for exposures and compliance flaws is extremely valuable but often overlooked. Capturing metadata from provider APIs enables system owners to automate the process of zeroing in on and remediating problems, creating fully automated remediation capabilities.

Fundamental information security control objectives are still requirements in cloud environments. What’s new is how these objectives can be achieved consistently, at scale, across distributed environments.

Well-implemented containerization and container orchestration platform protection for IaaS and PaaS environments is capable of solving these new challenges through efficient, effective, and consistent automation.

Capabilities Needed to Manage Information Security Risk in Orchestrated Container Environments

Forrester discusses and evaluates the capabilities needed to manage information security risk in orchestrated container environments.

In our experience, the capabilities should address the following.

Security for:

  • Container images at-rest (stored in registries), and in-motion (moving through CI/CD pipelines)
  • Container runtimes (e.g., Docker) running on hosts, pre-configured clusters (e.g., AWS Elastic Container Service or Elastic Kubernetes Service), or turnkey container- or runtime-as-a-service (e.g., Azure Container Instances or AWS Fargate)
  • Container instances launched into runtimes
  • Container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes or Mesos
  • Systems supporting containerized environments, such as image registry and artifact servers, code repositories, and Jenkins hosts.

Why We Believe CloudPassage Halo Achieved 5 of 5 in the Containerization and Container Orchestration Platform Protection Criterion

Our flagship solution is the CloudPassage Halo cloud security platform. Halo was purpose-built in 2010 to automate security and compliance for servers across public and hybrid cloud environments. Since that time, CloudPassage has invested heavily in the platform’s evolution to address new cloud technologies and their security needs. Halo now addresses security for server-based, containerized, and public cloud infrastructure environments including public, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments.

Halo’s containerization and container orchestration platform protection capabilities are included in Halo Container Secure, one of the three primary services of the Halo platform. The capabilities of Halo Container Secure are our implementation of security and compliance automation for containerized environments. Halo received the highest possible score (5 out of 5) in this criterion.

Here’s how we built Halo to achieve a level of capability worthy, in our opinion, of this independent recognition.

Key Requirements That Halo Is Designed To Address

In 2010, only the earliest adopters of public cloud technologies realized just how different containerized environments are. Then and now, CloudPassage has had the privilege of working with some of the largest and most sophisticated public cloud enterprises in the world.

  • Unified Capabilities – IaaS and PaaS services don’t exist in isolation. Modern application architectures now combine IaaS and PaaS services with server-based and containerization technology (some of which is delivered by the provider themselves). Looking at components in isolation limits context and slows analysis of the overall application environment. This makes the unification of data and management across various types of cloud infrastructure a critical requirement.
  • Portability – The majority of successful digital enterprises use multiple IaaS and PaaS providers for availability, cost management, and prevention of vendor lock-in. Even within a single cloud provider, not all regions operate identically; federal and some international service regions are good examples. This makes portability of capabilities within and across cloud providers critical. API compatibility, data normalization, and common policy management are just a few of the portability issues that are important to a successful deployment.
  • Scalability – The scale of cloud infrastructure typically changes both on a short-term basis (cloudbursting or autoscaling events) and in the long term (organic application growth, new applications, data center migration). Containerization and container orchestration platform protection capabilities must be able to quickly and automatically adapt to changes in infrastructure scale, in terms of both functional capacity and licensing.
  • Automation – Changes are programmatically automated in cloud and DevOps environments. If security and compliance functions are not equally automated, they will be quickly outpaced by the infrastructure’s rate of change. Automation is needed to ensure that security instrumentation is “part of the build” and not something to be added later. Automation also ensures consistency and eliminates errors, both critical needs in highly dynamic and diverse cloud environments.
  • Operational Integration – As previously discussed, aligning security and DevOps is a critical success factor that delivers mutual benefit and a stronger overall security posture. This requires that security functionality and intelligence are automatically delivered to system owner workflow tools (e.g., Jira, Slack, Jenkins). These needs are complex, especially in larger environments, making comprehensive REST APIs, data routing, and other operational integrations critical.

CloudPassage was guided by top cloud enterprises to build the Halo platform with these and similar cloud-specific requirements in mind. Below is how Halo implements containerization and container orchestration platform protection, including details on how the platform successfully addresses these vital needs.

How Halo Implements Containerization and Container Orchestration Platform Protection

From its inception, the innovations built into the Halo cloud security platform were designed to address the critical needs discussed above. These innovations are recognized by ten patents granted to CloudPassage between 2013 and 2019 that cover various aspects of the Halo technology.

Below are just a few of the design decisions and features that enable Halo’s unification, portability, scalability, automation, and operational integration for containerization and container orchestration protection:

  • Docker host and Kubernetes nodes protecting using low-friction, low-impact microagent (2MB in memory)—same agent for server, Docker host, and Kubernetes node security—all the agent features like automatic upgrade, no listening port to attack, patented agent and communication security, outbound-only “heartbeat” communication protocol, etc.
  • Customizable “out-of-the-box” policy templates for Docker hosts and Kubernetes nodes that supporting common security and compliance standards such as PCI DSS, CIS Benchmarks, HIPAA, and SOC 2 / SysTrust criteria for Docker 
  • Deep inspection and collection of container host metadata including raw Docker-inspect output, image source, identification of unknown or “rogue” containers, etc…
  • Fast, scalable, fully automated security analytics capabilities that include tracking of initial issue appearance, automated detection of remediation, and issue regressions
  • Detailed remediation advice for issues identified, presentation of raw assessment data for automation and inspection purposes, and instructions to manually verify findings if needed
  • Bidirectional REST APIs and direct integration with queueing services like AWS SQS to enable operational automation and direct integration with other security and DevOps tools
  • Operational features and integration tools to automate deployment, configuration, issue routing, email alerting, and bidirectional interaction with operational tools such as Jira and Slack
  • RBAC and data access features to ensure system owners only interact with authorized systems

The list of capabilities above only addresses Halo Container Secure, the Halo platform service that implements API-level connectivity and control.

An exhaustive explanation of every innovation is outside the scope of this article. However, Halo’s innovations cover a much broader range of cloud-related issues, including assumed-hostile running environments, multitenancy, asset cloning, ephemeral workloads, agent security, and more.

Learn More About CloudPassage Halo

To learn more:

Come back and read our upcoming blogs on:

  1. Scalability of protected cloud instances and protected containers
  2. Centralized Agent framework plans

Related Posts

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Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:15:12 +0000

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At CloudPassage we’re keenly aware of the disruption and stress being caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and related quarantine orders. We’re seeing impact across our ecosystem of customers, teams, and other stakeholders worldwide. Communication is critical in situations like this,…

The post CloudPassage Response to COVID-19 appeared first on CloudPassage.

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At CloudPassage we’re keenly aware of the disruption and stress being caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and related quarantine orders. We’re seeing impact across our ecosystem of customers, teams, and other stakeholders worldwide. Communication is critical in situations like this, and this article shares how CloudPassage is responding.

CloudPassage’s COVID-19 response strategy is focused on two critical priorities:

  • Ensuring the safety and well-being of our team, customers, and partners
  • Ensuring our cloud security services operate without impact

CloudPassage has a standing pandemic plan that implements this strategy. Elements of that plan have been activated in response to team needs and in line with guidance from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These elements include eliminating all travel, postponing events, validating pandemic plans of key partners, and adoption of a work-from-home strategy globally.

A significant portion of our workforce already operates remotely, so operational impact has been minimal. The CloudPassage team continues to deliver the level of support our customers need to protect their most critical cloud systems. Customers and partners should see no change in service or operations and can submit questions through the Halo Portal as always.

Our commitment to innovation and product improvement is also unimpacted. Several key container security features were released just this week, and the development of the Halo platform roadmap continues. We’re increasing our existing use of video and teleconference technologies whenever possible to continue to foster our strong culture of teamwork and collaboration.

With public gatherings being limited to small groups or being canceled entirely, we are developing plans to establish a series of live and online hosted and sponsored events to remain connected with our customers and partners.

We’re well aware that attackers aren’t stopping and business must continue in this environment (and in some cases, both are accelerating). We remain focused on supporting our customers while striving to assure team health and safety. 

Communication during these times is critical. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to any CloudPassage representative or to covid-19@cloudpassage.com with questions or concerns.

Thank you, and good luck during these trying times.

Carson Signature

Carson Sweet
Chief Executive Officer
CloudPassage

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Thu, 05 Mar 2020 05:13:50 +0000

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The “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019” report published by leading global research and advisory firm Forrester, Inc. provides an excellent overview of the security challenges posed by the transition to cloud-based environments and discusses the cloud workload security…

The post API-level Connectivity and Control for IaaS and PaaS: Cloud Workload Security Part 2 appeared first on CloudPassage.

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The “Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019” report published by leading global research and advisory firm Forrester, Inc. provides an excellent overview of the security challenges posed by the transition to cloud-based environments and discusses the cloud workload security solutions best poised to address them. One important criterion is API-level Connectivity and Control for IaaS and PaaS.

Application infrastructure has always been complex. The “big bang” of cloud computing created an ever-expanding universe of new infrastructure services and resources available on-demand from IaaS and PaaS platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Platform. When combined, this universe of resources represents a mind-numbing set of potential permutations. Cloud computing and DevOps also drive the speed and volume of changes to levels almost guaranteed to overwhelm traditional security approaches and technologies.

Achieving security visibility and control in these new environments are key needs discussed in the Forrester Wave and other research. Fulfilling these needs typically involves automation that leverages the cloud provider’s APIs to discover, assess, and monitor services and resources in IaaS environments. Forrester refers to this overall capability as “API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS”.

CloudPassage’s solution is Halo, a platform for cloud computing security purpose-built to automate security and compliance management across public and hybrid cloud environments. In The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2019 report, Halo received the highest possible score (5 out of 5) in the API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS criterion. This blog explores this criterion

About API-level Connectivity and Control for IaaS and PaaS

In the Key Takeaways section of “The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019”, Forrester states the following:

“As on-premises security suites technology becomes outdated and less effective to provide comprehensive support for cloud workloads, improved broad coverage support for guest/host OS; API-level connectivity to the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) platform; and container orchestration and runtime platforms will dictate which providers lead the pack.”

If API-level connectivity and control will be a defining trait of cloud security leaders, the implication seems clear—this capability is important to customers. The Forrester report states that cloud workload security customers should seek vendors that:

“Provide templatized API-level configuration management to IaaS and PaaS platforms. You can’t control Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using old school, on-premises CMDB tools. Instead, you want tight control over instance and storage creation and network connectivity. Best practices, vulnerability, and compliance templates (CIS, CVE, or HIPAA) built into and consistently updated by vendors for managing configurations are key differentiators in this area.”

Clearly this capability is important. But what exactly is “API-level connectivity and control”, why is it important, and what can I do with it?

What Is API-level Connectivity and Control for IaaS and PaaS?

API-level connectivity and control uses cloud provider APIs to automatically discover, inventory, assess, monitor, and control IaaS and PaaS environments. The scope of these features typically includes infrastructure resources and services in the IaaS/PaaS account, as well as the account itself.

This basic functionality must be able to handle the dynamic, diverse and distributed nature of cloud infrastructure. Just a few of the additional capabilities needed include customizable policy and rule templates, data normalization across IaaS/PaaS providers, easy integration with cloud provider environments, and scalability.

Many industry terms are synonymous with “API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS”. A few of these include:

  • Cloud security posture management (CSPM)
  • Cloud workload security assessment and monitoring
  • Continuous cloud compliance monitoring
  • Cloud infrastructure security
  • IaaS security

Regardless of the name, the concept is deceptively simple:

  • connect to a cloud provider API
  • retrieve data points relevant to security and compliance
  • evaluate that data against standards

But as always, the devil is in the details. Scalability issues, impact on API limits, cross-cloud portability, multi-cloud data normalization, and correlation with other security and compliance data are all problems that a successful solution must handle. Later in this blog, we’ll cover how Halo’s implementation tamed these issues well enough to achieve a 5 out of 5 score.

For now, let’s consider why these capabilities are important and what you can do with them.

Why API-level Connectivity and Control for IaaS and PaaS is Important

Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been a critical part of application stacks for decades, most often related to the software itself. Cloud computing has made APIs central to the successful adoption of DevOps, continuous delivery, and infrastructure automation. Infrastructure today is really just more code, quickly and easily iterated across huge numbers of resources.

This trend in cloud infrastructure makes API-level connectivity and control important capabilities for security and compliance. Here are some of the most important reasons why.

APIs Help Keep Up Cloud Speed and Scale

API-driven speed and agility results in a massive increase in change velocity. Every change introduces the potential for harm, and those risks must be managed as changes occur. Without a way to keep up with the velocity of API-driven infrastructure, security and compliance practitioners are quickly overwhelmed and something will get missed.

Even the most meticulously hardened cloud environment will end up exposed by errors and oversights on the part of humans or weak automation tools. This is in large part related to the large number of configuration settings, access vectors, and access control structures that have to be constantly monitored. In fact, 99 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault through 2025, according to recent research from Gartner.

Without the right automation, the risk of making a mistake is amplified. This leaves us with a top reason that API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS is important: to extend the speed, scale, and consistency benefits of API-based automation to security and compliance.

APIs Help Security Align With DevOps To Achieve DevSecOps

DevOps is the new norm in how applications are developed, deployed, and operated. Smart security leaders are seeking ways to harmonize security with DevOps methods and processes in order to create similar scale and leverage.

API-based automation is a critical pillar at the center of any true DevOps shop. Workflows in a DevOps shop are driven by automation tools wired together with APIs, right down to the way that engineers communicate with one another. When a task is expected to be repeated, it’s automated on-the-spot. Changes are deployed when ready, typically without human intervention or review. These concepts are often foreign to security and compliance practitioners and may even seem to run counter to risk control objectives.

Collaboration with DevOps teams requires that security and compliance teams embrace “the DevOps way”, which in no small part means becoming API-driven. This is important to learning how to engage DevOps on their terms, achieving the speed and consistency benefits of DevOps-style automation, and even to ensure common situational awareness—if both teams leverage the same APIs, consistent awareness will be built-in.

Historically, security vendors have been remiss in providing users with rich APIs, making API-driven operations somewhat foreign to security teams. The emergence of purpose-built cloud security solutions are changing that scene by exposing API-driven capabilities to users. This is the very essence of API-level connectivity and control capabilities.

APIs Support Continuous Monitoring to Prevent The Worst

Unlike traditional data centers, cloud infrastructure environments are designed to be in a constant state of change. Compute, storage, networking, and other IaaS resources continuously added, removed, and modified by automated tools. Resources can be copied or made into templates used to scale infrastructure in autoscaling events, or just to address general growth. These capabilities are powerful.

But such power doesn’t come without risk. Cloud resources are often cloned in-place, which means every exposure is cloned with them. Automation scripts are not always QA’ed or inspected, especially in the heat of an outage situation. One vulnerable image or poorly written update script can become “Typhoid Mary”, spreading deadly problems throughout the environment very quickly. In other words, the creation of new attackable surface areas and exposures without warning should be completely expected.

In a recently released white paper, CloudPassage shared the nastiest mistakes we’ve seen expose IaaS & PaaS environments. In summary, those exposures include:

  • Easily hacked administrative credentials
  • Exposed data assets
  • Weak network access controls
  • Unconstrained blast radius
  • Poor event logging

The Gartner research mentioned above confirms our own experience—issues like these can be prevented. API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS is one of the keys to that prevention. That makes these capabilities an important part of your cloud security arsenal.

Use Cases for API-level Connectivity and Control for IaaS and PaaS

The simple ability to connect to an API and analyze the data found there is a far cry from automating a specific operational task at scale, across the environment. In our experience working with hundreds of companies on cloud security, the most critical question to ask may be “What can I do with it?”

These capabilities can address many use cases, too many to list. The most common use cases in which control objectives are achieved with API-level connectivity and control include:

  • Continuous Asset Awareness – API-based discovery and inventory of IaaS services and resources—you can’t do any of the things below if you don’t know the assets exist
  • Point-In-Time Security Assessment – assessment of public cloud account security, including the IaaS account itself and the security of the services and assets inside the account
  • Continuous Security Monitoring – ongoing IaaS environment monitoring to detect and evaluate how changes and events impact security and compliance posture
  • Compliance Auditing & Monitoring – point-in-time evaluation of compliance posture against a range of standards (a.k.a. pre-auditing) or continuous compliance monitoring to surface issues as they arise instead of “cleaning up” right before an audit
  • Detect Indicators of Threat & Compromise – attackers will use cloud technology to their advantage, leaving cloud “versions” of rootkits and other malicious artifacts as part of attacks. With the right API-based automation, indicators of these situations can be quickly detected to accelerate prevention, isolation, containment, investigation and clean-up.
  • Automated Issue Remediation – leveraging cloud provider APIs to implement automatic remediation for exposures and compliance flaws is extremely valuable but often overlooked. Capturing metadata from provider APIs enables system owners to automate the process of zeroing in on and remediating problems, creating fully automated remediation capabilities.

Fundamental information security control objectives are still requirements in cloud environments. What’s new is how these objectives can be achieved consistently, at scale, across distributed environments. Well-implemented API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS environments is capable of solving these new challenges through efficient, effective, and consistent automation.

Why We Believe CloudPassage Halo Achieved 5 of 5 for API-level Connectivity and Control for IaaS and PaaS

CloudPassage’s solution is the Halo cloud security platform. Halo was purpose-built in 2010 to automate security and compliance management for servers across public and hybrid cloud environments. Since that time, CloudPassage has invested heavily in the platform’s evolution to address new cloud technologies and their security needs. Halo now addresses security for server-based, containerized, and public cloud infrastructure environments including public, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments.

CloudPassage Halo received the highest score possible (5 out of 5) for seven criteria in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security report, including API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS. Halo’s public cloud infrastructure security capabilities are included in Halo Cloud Secure, one of the three major modules of the Halo platform. The capabilities of Halo Cloud Secure are our implementation of API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS.

Here’s how we built Halo to achieve, in our opinion, a level of capability worthy of this independent recognition.

Key Requirements That Halo Is Designed to Address

In 2010 only the earliest adopters of public cloud technologies realized just how different these environments really are. Then and now, CloudPassage has had the privilege of working with some of the largest and most sophisticated public cloud enterprises in the world to guide our building of the Halo platform for cloud-specific requirements. These experiences gave us a deep understanding of the key requirements for successful cloud security, including API-level connectivity and control for IaaS and PaaS. While other requirements certainly exist, some of the most critical include:

  • Unified capabilities for IaaS, PaaS, servers, and containers – IaaS and PaaS services don’t exist in isolation. Modern application architectures now combine IaaS and PaaS services with server-based and containerization technology (some of which is delivered by the provider themselves). Looking at components in isolation limits context and slows analysis of the overall application environment. This makes unification of data and management across various types of cloud infrastructure a critical requirement.
  • Portability across cloud providers – the majority of successful digital enterprises use multiple IaaS and PaaS providers for availability, cost management, and prevention of vendor lock-in. Even within a single cloud provider, not all regions operate identically; federal and some international service regions are good examples. This makes portability of API-based capabilities within and across cloud providers critical. API compatibility, data normalization, and common policy management are just a few of the portability issues that are important to a successful deployment.
  • Scalability – the scale of cloud infrastructure typically changes both on a short-term basis (cloudbursting or autoscaling events) and in the long term (organic application growth, new applications, data center migration). API-level connectivity and control capabilities must be able to quickly and automatically adapt to changes in infrastructure scale, in terms of both functional capacity and licensing.
  • Automation – changes are programmatically automated in cloud and DevOps environments. If security and compliance functions are not equally automated, it will be easily outpaced by the infrastructure’s rate of change. Automation is needed to ensure that security instrumentation is “part of the build” and not something to be added later. Automation also ensures consistency and eliminates errors, both critical needs in highly dynamic and diverse cloud environments.
  • Operational Integration – as previously discussed, aligning security and DevOps is an important success factor that delivers mutual benefit and a stronger overall security posture. This requires that security functionality and intelligence is automatically delivered to system owner workflow tools (e.g. Jira, Slack, Jenkins). These needs are complex, especially in larger environments, making comprehensive REST APIs, data routing, and other operational integrations critical.

How Halo Implements API-Level Connectivity and Control

From its inception, the innovations built into the Halo cloud security platform were designed to address the critical needs discussed above. These innovations were recognized by ten patents being granted to CloudPassage between 2013 and 2019 that cover various aspects of the Halo technology.

Here are just a few of the design decisions and features that enable Halo’s unification, portability, scalability, automation and operational integration for API-level connectivity and control:

  • Use of existing cloud service provider API access constructs for easy, low-friction configuration, including delegated access to enable cross-account security management
  • Customizable “out-of-the-box” policy templates supporting common security and compliance standards such as PCI DSS, CIS Benchmarks, HIPAA, and SOC 2 / SysTrust criteria
  • Deep inspection and collection of all cloud resource metadata including raw resource-inspection output, user-defined resource tags, and platform metadata such as region, creation details, etc.
  • Fast, scalable, fully automated security analytics capabilities that include tracking of initial issue appearance, automated detection of remediation, and issue regressions
  • Normalized data model that presents disparate IaaS details in a common structure and format
  • Detailed remediation advice for issues identified, presentation of raw assessment data for automation and inspection purposes, and instructions to manually verify findings if needed
  • Bidirectional REST APIs and direct integration with queueing services like AWS SQS to enable operational automation and direct integration with other security and DevOps tools
  • Operational features and integration tools to automate deployment, configuration, issue routing, email alerting, and bidirectional interaction with operational tools such as Jira and Slack
  • RBAC and data access features to ensure system owners only interact with authorized systems

The list of capabilities above only addresses Halo Cloud Secure, the Halo platform module that implements API-level connectivity and control.

An exhaustive explanation of every innovation is outside the scope of this article. However, Halo’s innovations cover a much broader range of cloud-related issues including assumed-hostile running environments, multitenancy, asset cloning, ephemeral workloads, agent security, and more.

To Learn More

Download The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019.

Read more about CloudPassage Halo’s IaaS CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) capabilties

Come back and read our upcoming blogs on other criteria for which CloudPassage received the highest scores possible in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019 Report.

Containerization and container orchestration platform protection
Scalability: protected cloud instances and protected containers
Centralized agent framework plans
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Fri, 31 Jan 2020 04:01:49 +0000

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An independent evaluation published by leading global research and advisory firm Forrester provides an excellent overview of the security challenges posed by the transition to cloud-based environments—and discusses the cloud workload security solutions best poised to address them. Why is…

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Fri, 10 Jan 2020 08:00:00 +0000

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Monolithic applications are outdated. We are now solidly in a development revolution as rapid software development and deployment have become standard. Microservices and containers are key to enabling this new way of working driven by DevOps practices such as Continuous Integration…

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Monolithic applications are outdated. We are now solidly in a development revolution as rapid software development and deployment have become standard. Microservices and containers are key to enabling this new way of working driven by DevOps practices such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. As a result, securing Kubernetes master and worker nodes has become critical.

Harnessing the Value of Microservices and Kubernetes

As we welcome 2020, we expect mass migration to microservices. By enabling you to structure an application into several modular services, microservices bring:

  • Improvements to scale
  • The ability to withstand high server loads 
  • Faster deployments 
  • Easy fault isolation

Microservices offer flexibility in using a wide mix of technologies and having autonomous, cross-functional teams. But as microservices grow in popularity, so does the attack surface, so they require a different approach to security.

Kubernetes is one of the fastest-growing container orchestration platforms used to implement microservices and has more than a 50% market share. The idea behind the tool is to operate with containers, which contain a microservice—a small part of your application. Kubernetes by itself is secured, but no one can be safe from server misconfiguration, which was identified as one of the biggest threats in public cloud for security leaders in 2018

For example, in 2018 hackers got access to Tesla`s Kubernetes and ran cryptocurrency miners on their cluster. So how do you secure the Kubernetes cluster?

CloudPassage Policy Templates Support Securing Kubernetes

Support for securing Kubernetes was released in CloudPassage Server Secure enabling customers to evaluate the security posture of their Kubernetes infrastructure. 

Users can now perform security assessment scans of Kubernetes Master nodes and Worker nodes using our two Kubernetes policy templates, which are based on the CIS Benchmark standard. The master node policy template has 73 security configuration assessment rules, e.g. Ensure that the — anonymous-auth argument is set to false; while the worker node policy template has 23 security configuration assessment rules, e.g. Ensure that the –event qps argument is set to 0. 

Securing Kubernetes List of Master Rules

Figure 1. List of Master Rules

Kubernetes Security Scan Results

Let’s take a closer look at how our Kubernetes security support works. The scan results below are the output of a scan on a freshly installed default Kubernetes master node installation. 

As you can see, a default Kubernetes installation needs a lot of work to be completely secure. Many benchmark rules produce ‘fail’ results which implies that the configuration needs hardening.

Securing Kubernetes Master Fail Rules

Figure 2. Master Fail Rules

Users can select any individual rule and go over the ‘Description’ and ‘Rationale’ fields to understand the check. If required, users can perform manual tests using the steps from the ‘Audit’ section. And finally, follow the guidance from the ‘Remediation’ section to secure their configuration. An example of one such rule is shown below:

Rule Details for: Ensure that the — anonymous-auth argument is set to false

Securing Kubernetes Rule Details

Figure 3. Rule Details

Similar results are seen with the scan of the worker node. The CSM scan produces many fail results as seen below which implies that these settings need to be hardened to secure the configuration.

Securing Kubernetes Worker Fail Rules

Figure 4. Worker Fail Rules

 Configuration Checks of Note

Some of my favorite configuration checks for securing Kubernetes in this policy template are listed below with links to find more information:

Securing Container Runtimes

In addition, Kubernetes can be configured to use different container runtimes, with Docker being a popular choice in most cases. This implies that users should harden Docker as well as securing Kubernetes, which can be done using the CloudPassage Docker template that evaluates the security posture of a Docker configuration. Users should also keep in mind that all of these applications are running on the operating system which itself has many attack vectors. 

  • Users managing Kubernetes’ master and worker by themselves should use CloudPassage OS policy templates for a security evaluation. 
  • If users are using a public cloud (like AWS or Azure) to run their workers they should use CloudPassage Cloud Secure to evaluate the security posture of their cloud infrastructure.

Conclusion

To conclude, Kubernetes and microservices are great infrastructure choices. Although when it comes to securing Kubernetes, users should assess not only Kubernetes but container runtimes as well as operating systems or cloud infrastructures to get a complete end-to-end view of their security posture.

Learn how the CloudPassage Halo cloud security platform for servers can help secure the servers in your Kubernetes infrastructure.

Learn more about how the CloudPassage Halo platform helps with container security.

Get a free vulnerability assessment of your infrastructure in 30 minutes.

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August 28, 2020 at 09:09PM