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December 15, 2021The Log4j Vulnerability - Cloud Providers Respond
Cloud Security News this week 15 December 2021
This week, the world of cybersecurity has been consumed by the Log4Shell vulnerability. So whats it all about. Log4j is a Java library for logging error messages in applications. It was developed by the open-source Apache Software Foundation and is a key Java-logging framework. The critical zero day security vulnerability has been named ‘Log4Shell’ and has a maximum CVSS ( Common Vulnerability Scoring System ) score of 10. The zero-day had been exploited at least nine days before it surfaced on Thursday. This vulnerability puts any device connected to the internet and running Apache Log4J, versions 2.0 to 2.14.1.at risk. This impacts cloud services, developer services, security devices, mapping services, and more.

AWS has released details on how the flaw impacts its services and said it is working on patching its services that use Log4j and has released mitigations for services like CloudFront. This can be viewed here. Microsoft has also released Guidance for preventing, detecting, and hunting for Log4j exploitation here and Google cloud is also “is actively following the security vulnerability” and has released recommendations for investigating and responding to the Apache “Log4j 2” vulnerability here IBM said it is "actively responding" to the Log4j vulnerability across IBM's own infrastructure and its products, can be found here and Oracle has issued a patch too here. There is a comprehensive list of all known softwares vulnerable and not vulnerable to LogShell is available on GitHub along with any known fixes. Here

This vulnerability is being exploited to install malware, crypto mining, perform DDOS attacks, drop Cobalt Strike beacons, scan for vulnerable servers and exfiltrate information.

To finish on a note other log4J - Have you heard about Dazz? Well if you haven't, they are a one-year old cloud security remediation startup that recently closed another round of funding and raised 60 million dollars. Dazz is looking to automate cloud security through their AI driven product in a developer friendly way. You can find out more about them hereEpisode Show Notes on Cloud Security Podcast Website.
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3 min
December 08, 2021AWS Outage - What is impacted?
Cloud Security News this week 8 December 2021
If you use AWS, you may have noticed some issues with your services this week. AWS reported on Tuesday morning that they were seeing impacts to multiple APIs in the US-East 1 region. The issues were impacting their monitoring and incident response tooling impacting their ability to provide timely updates. A bit later they reported that they had identified the root cause of the issue causing service API and console issues. Root logins for consoles in all AWS regions were affected by this issue, however customers could login to consoles other than US-EAST-1 by using an IAM role for authentication. Services impacted include: EC2, Connect, DynamoDB, Glue, Athena, Timestream, and Chime. Most of the services have now recovered and all updates can be viewed here

Recently McAfee and FireEye announced the availability of new cloud security capabilities on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as integration with the Amazon Inspector vulnerability management service. According to McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, their behavior analysis and machine-learning extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities combined with Amazon Inspector promises to deliver AWS customers greater visibility and protection of cloud-based applications and data.

The research team at LightSpin discovered that the Jupiter Notebook instance of SageMaker could reach the Notebook Instance metadata endpoint. For context, having access to the metadata endpoint and requesting access tokens from an over-permissive IAM Role is a very well known SSRF vulnerability in AWS. In this case, the research team reported their finding to AWS and this has been resolved since. You can learn more about this here

Zscaler, an American cloud-based information security company known for their Zscaler private and internet access and now the creators of Zero Trust Exchange platform have now announced the general availability of its new Workload Communications solution, which is part of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. This extends Zero Trust security to workloads and applications hosted in public cloud to eliminate attack surfaces, prevent lateral threat movement, inhibit compromise of workloads, and stop data loss. It also helps IT teams simplify multi-cloud workload connectivity by moving away from traditional IP-based routing and VPNs between cloud environments to expedite enterprises' cloud transformation initiatives. You can learn more about this here.
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4 min
December 02, 2021AWS re:Invent 2021 - All the Cloud Security Updates so far
Cloud Security News this week 2 December 2021
AWS has launched some improvements to a few of their existing services and no new Security service has been announced yet. With Google Cloud announcing their CyberSecurity Action team earlier this year, we were hoping for a similar response or better from AWS but nothing so far.

Updates to AWS Shield, Amazon Cloud Guru and Amazon Inspector.

For those storing CloudTrail logs or other important logs to help with incident response in S3 buckets, you can now use EventBridge to build applications that react quickly and efficiently to changes in your S3 objects. This will deliver responses to potential Events/incidents of interest in a faster, more reliable, and in a more developer-friendly way than ever. More on this here

If you use AWS Control Tower and care about Data Residency, now you will be able to apply Preventive and detective controls that prevent provisioning resources in unwanted AWS Regions by restricting access to AWS APIs through service control policies (SCPs) built and managed by AWS Control Tower. This means that content cannot be created or transferred outside of your selected Regions at the infrastructure level. More on this here

They have announced Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM), a new feature that provides network administrators with an automated IP management workflow.making it easier to organize, assign, monitor, and audit IP addresses in at-scale networks. More on this here

new feature.” Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer. In contrast to manual checking of network configurations, which is error-prone and hard to scale, this tool lets you analyze your AWS networks of any size and complexity. You can get started with a set of Amazon-created scopes, and then either copy & customize them, or create your own from scratch. More on this here

A new Amazon S3 Object Ownership setting and the Amazon S3 console policy editor. More on the
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8 min
November 24, 202124 November 2021 - GoDaddy looses 1.2 million user information
Cloud Security News this week 24 November 2021
CSA recently announced that they have now had 1500 Cloud services evaluated across to the STAR registry principles. According to CSA, by publishing to the registry organizations can show current and potential customers their security and compliance posture which may prevent the need for them to complete multiple security questionnaires. You can find more information about CSA and STAR registry here

Security researcher Schütz was rewarded a $4,133 bounty by the Google Vulnerability Rewards Program for his Google Internal API vulnerability discovery. Google has now fixed this bug. You can read more about this here and the Schütz has documented his discovery here

Palo Alto Networks - a well known cybersecurity Vendor - Their Chairman and CEO Nikesh Arora told investors that they are “18-to-24 months ahead from a competitive platform perspective”. There a few exciting players in the Cloud Security Market right now and you can read more about this here You can also find more about Palo Alto, Orca Security, Wiz and Lacework on the links

Lacework, they have recently raised $1.3 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $8.3 billion, making this one of the largest venture funding rounds of the year in the United States. Nasdaq covered a bit more about this here. In comparison Orca Security raised $550 million in Series C funding to raise their valuation to $1.8 Billion and Wiz raised $250 million on a $6 billion valuation

Clubhouse, an audio based chatroom launched in 2020 which gained popularity during the pandemic has launched a BugBounty program on HackerOne. The scope of the Bounty includes their API and websites. The program has upto $3000 on offer for any critical vulnerabilities reported. You can find more about the program here

Using a compromised password, an unauthorised third party has managed to infiltrate GoDaddy’s systems affecting atleast 1.2 million users. Along with usernames, passwords and emails, the attackers also gained access to SSL private keys for a subset of users.
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6 min
November 17, 202117 November 2021 - Feds go Cloud Smart + Alibaba Cloud targeted by Hackers
Cloud Security News this week 17 November 2021
According to a research by Trend Micro, Elastic Computing Service (ECS) instances for Alibab Cloud are becoming an increasingly common target for financially motivated hackers with cryptomining goals. This increased targeting may be due to a few unique features of Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba ECS instances come with a preinstalled security agent and provides root access/ privileged control by default. There is a detailed article attached about this here

JupiterOne (a Cyber Asset Management Platform ) and Cisco have announced the launch of Secure Cloud Insights, an expanded cloud security and security operations partnership designed to provide businesses with a range of cybersecurity services. This new solution is aimed at helping Cisco customers achieve a higher level of maturity with their digital transformation and security program. CEO of Jupiter One, Erkang Zheng calls it a game changing offering - that would provide increased visibility, efficiency, and speed to security operations, with combined context from situational awareness and structural data. We would be curious to know if you think the same.

Those familiar with Palo Alto and their core cloud-security package, Prisma may be intrigued to know that they have launched Prisma 3.0.

Truffle Security has released an open source hacking tools called Driftwood designed to discover leaked, paired private and public keys which may be harmful. Driftwood builds upon Truffle Hog and is available on Github. Truffle Security in their blog which is shared here. stated that With this tool they found the private keys for hundreds of Transport Layer Security certificates, and Secure Shell keys that would have allowed an attacker to compromise millions of endpoints/devices.

The Federal government is going from a “Cloud First” to a “Cloud Smart” strategy to leverage cloud without compromising security. They quoted that “Cloud Smart is about equipping agencies with the tools and knowledge they need to make these decisions for themselves, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.The shift will be from “buy before build” to “solve before buy,”. Under security they added that “Successfully managing cloud adoption risks requires collaboration” leaning into that shared responsibility model we hear often about with Cloud Security. The link to the document is here

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5 min
November 10, 202110 November, 2021 - Secure AWS + Azure from one Place, Better Linux Security support on Azure
Cloud Security News this week 10 November 2021
Microsoft is extending its native cloud security posture management (CSPM) and workload protection capabilities to Amazon Web Services (AWS) - yes you heard that right! within a suite called Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This was previously know as Azure Security Center and Azure Defender At their annual conference Ignite 2021, their focus was enterprise cloud protection, specially multi cloud environments. Microsoft Defender for Cloud will now let organizations secure AWS and Azure environments from one place without depending on the AWS Security Hub. We will bring you the highlights from Ignite 2021 next week, you can check out the event virtually here

For folks who have been waiting on better security services support for Linux on Microsoft Azure - they recently announced the expansion of the Defender for Endpoint on Linux capabilities. Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-based product that includes vulnerability management and assessment, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) on Linux servers.

Are you wondering about Oracle Cloud and what they are upto? Oracle Cloud most recently trying to stand out amongst its competitors by broadening the range of built-in and add-on cybersecurity features in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle said the new features are intended not only to simplify management but also to address the problem misconfiguration and user error. If you want to find out more - you can check out their new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Web Application Firewall for Flexible Load Balancers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Vulnerability Scanning Service, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Bastion and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certificates

If you use Crowdstrike, this ones for you. The popular real-time detection and automated response software, Crowstrike is making some big moves in the Cloud Space, doubling down on zero trust.

The National Security Agency (NSA) and CISA have published the first of a four-part series, Security Guidance for 5G Cloud Infrastructures. Security Guidance for 5G Cloud Infrastructures – Part I: Prevent and Detect Lateral Movement. Read more here

If you have been reading about Robinhood being hacked, this one wasn't a cloud security breach however a good old social engineering attack which if your interested to know more about, you can read here
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4 min
November 03, 202103 November, 2021 - AWS Earns over 16billion this quarter + SEGA on Microsoft Azure
Cloud Security News this week 27 October 2021
In case you missed the quarterly earnings updates from last episode, I do encourage you to check it out to see how Google Cloud and Azure faired last Quarter. AWS came out still leading the pack $16.11 billion in the quarter, up almost 39% from a year ago. You can view the report here

Industry Tech giants including Google, Salesforce, Okta and Slack have announced the creation of a “vendor-neutral” security baseline for businesses called ‘Minimum Viable Secure Product’ (MVSP). Its a minimalistic security checklist for B2B software and business process outsourcing supplier designed to eliminate overhead, complexity and confusion during the procurement and vendor security assessment process by establishing minimum acceptable security baselines. The intention is to increase clarity reduce the onboarding and sales cycle by weeks or even months. You can view the checklist here

Remote code execution vulnerability was patched by Gitlab in April 2021 however researchers from Rapid 7 recently found that the exploitations were continuing to this day, with only 21% of the instances fully patched against the issue. Gitlab strongly recommends updating to the latest version to remedy this. Read more about Rapid 7’s research here and Gitlab’s release here

IBM has released their report - Cloud’s Next Leap. They surveyed over 7000 executives in enterprise cloud adoption over 44 countries. 59% of organizations reported that digital transformation has accelerated for them through the pandemic. Not dissimilar to other reports this year, most of their respondents are also yet to fully realize cloud’s full transformational power. Hybrid cloud/multicloud once again is reported to be the dominant architecture for cloud service delivery. Something rather interesting they reported on is that while many organisations are moving to the cloud, they are often moving to different versions of it.Report here

For our sonic hedgehog gaming fans, Tokyo-based Sega is looking to produce large-scale, global games in a next-generation development environment built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The intent is to create big-budget titles using Microsoft’s know how - who also own Xbox cloud gaming tech.
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4 min
October 27, 202127 October, 2021 - AWS lands UK Spy Agency Contract
Cloud Security News this week 27 October 2021
UK’s spy agencies have given a contract to AWS to host classified material. Their intention is to boost use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage. The agreement, estimated by industry experts to be worth £500m to £1bn over the next decade. The Guardian has reported that “the contract with Amazon is likely to ignite concerns over sovereignty because the UK’s most secret data will be hosted by a single US tech company” - Quite the interesting comment and Cloud Security News would love to hear your thoughts on this

It's also the season for Revenue announcements for Quarter 3 for our big cloud providers. Google announced this week that Google Cloud revenue jumped 45 percent to $4.99 billion in the third quarter compared to the same period last year. You can view the results here

Microsoft also announced their Quarter 3 revenue for Intelligent Cloud to be $17.0 billion, an increase of 31% - You can view the results here

Microsoft shared earlier this month that things remain “Business as usual for Azure customers despite 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack” in Europe. They reported that the attack traffic originated from approximately 70,000 sources and from multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Read the full statement from Microsoft here

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has detected nation-state activity associated with NOBELIUM. It's quite the interesting read and the full blog can be found here.

If you use discourse, a popular open source forum software, you should make sure that you update to Discourse versions 2.7.9 or later, as a security bug has been found that affects Discourse versions 2.7.8 and earlier.
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6 min
October 22, 202122 October, 2021 - HashiConf 2021 - The best Cloud Security Bits
Cloud Security News this week 22 October 2021
Hope you have been enjoying your Cloud Security News this week and in our special third instalment for this week we bring you our best bits from Hashiconf Global 2021, conference held by Hashicorp. Hashicorp is a software company who provide open source tools and products - some of their popular products Vagrant, Terraform, Vault and boundary - You can view the conference and the talks here
The opening keynote was delivered by their Co-Founders Mitchell Hashimoto, Armon Dadgar, and CEO Dave McJannet - with key themes around Zero Trust, Hybrid and MultiCloud - looking to make Zero Trust more accessible for users. Mitchell Hashimoto spoke about the challenges Developers face when deploying applications with Kubernetes and how Waypoint assists with this.

They also spoke about the Hashicorp Cloud Platform (HCP) and the packer service which is now in public Beta, available free to use. Some of the features highlighted included remediation, enforcing security checks and maintaining images

Shane Petrich from Target in his talk “Managing Target's Secrets Platform” spoke about how Target manages and maintains its enterprise deployment of HashiCorp Vault (Hashicorp’s secret management and data protection product) -- everything from unattended builds, automated maintenance activities, and client onboardings.

Identity and account access is one of the first things you set up in the cloud and Austin Burdine, Mike Saraf and Yates Spearman share how Red Ventures implemented a custom Terraform solution to automate access management, meeting the requirements of various compliance frameworks

Last year Hashicorp announced Boundary, their secure remote access solution. This year at Hashiconf 2021, Susmitha Girumala and Mike Gaffney from HashiCorp showcased what is new in Boundary with a demo of key capabilities of identity-based access, integrated secrets management with Vault and dynamic host catalogs.

Mark Guan and Ruoran Wang from Stripe’s Service Networking Team spoke about their multi-region service networking tech stack built on Consul (Hashicorp’s service networking solution), how it works across AWS accounts and regions, federated multi-region clusters and on Kubernetes. They also generously shared the challenges they faced.
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4 min
October 21, 202121 October, 2021 - Kubecon NA 2021 - what you might miss
Cloud Security News this week 21 October 2021
It's a month full of conferences and as promised we are back with our 2nd episode this week to bring you the cloud security highlights from KubeCon. In this episode we will share some of our team’s favourite from Kubecon 2021 North America
If you aren't quite familiar with the wonderful world of Kubernetes, there are a few weird and wonderful open source acronyms in today’s episode. TUF refers to The Update Framework, SPIFFE refers to Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone SPIFFE, SPIRE is the SPIFFE’s Runtime Environment). Now that we are all across cool Kube words - lets into the talks
Starting off with the talk from Andrew Martin, Co-Founder of Control Plane and Author of Hacking Kubernetes and Kubernetes Threat Modelling. He spoke about Kubernetes Supply Chain Security - he showcased work to build a Kubernetes Software Factory with Tekton and Deep dived on signing and verification approaches to securely build software with (TUF) SPIFFE, SPIRE and sigstore

Ian Coldwater from Twilio; Brad Geesaman & Rory McCune from Aqua Security Duffie Cooley from Isovalent combined forces to share with the community how they do security research or hacking Kubenetes clusters using a recently discovered Kubernetes CVE (Common Vulnerability and exposure) - Their talk was called Exploiting a Slightly Peculiar Volume Configuration with SIG-Honk

Matt Jarvis from Synk shared what to do if your container has a huge number of Vulnerabilities - how to prioritise them and remediate them in his talk My Container Image has 500 Vulnerabilities, Now What?

Talking about containers and Vulnerability scanning If you want to know about how vulnerability scanners work, their blind spots and how to implement a practical risk based approach to remedy vulnerabilities that really matter to your organisation - check out Pushkar Joglekar’s Keeping Up with the CVEs: How to Find a Needle in a Haystack?

If you find yourself asking “How do I access my S3 bucket in AWS from my GCP cluster?” Brandon Lum & Mariusz Sabath, IBM may have the answer for you in their talk Untangling the Multi-Cloud Identity and Access Problem With SPIFFE Tornjak where they talk about a proposed shift in the perspective of workload identity from being “platform specific” to “organization wide” using SPIFFE/SPIRE and the new SPIFFE Tornjak project.
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4 min

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