Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a category defined by Gartner to address the growing needs of public cloud IaaS and PaaS services to address the challenges of misconfiguration. According to Gartner, nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement, and mistakes. A single misconfiguration can expose hundreds of thousands of systems or highly sensitive data to the public internet.
One aspect of cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is that it’s easier to create infrastructure resources than it is to destroy them. Even more challenging is maintaining full visibility over all of your cloud resources. Corey Quinn once said, and I’m paraphrasing, “the only way to see everything you have running in your AWS account is to look at your AWS bill.”
Software is eating the world. In the age of cloud computing, developers now own the security posture of your enterprise because the cloud is fully software-defined and programmable. If that scares you, it's because you haven't given your developers the tools to create secure systems. The good news is that you can, but you need to change how you think about security.
In part two of the Cloud Network Security blog series, we will discuss two methods of securing your network within Amazon Web Services: security groups and network access control lists (NACLs). Both resource types act as a virtual firewall to protect your network, and they have some similarities. For example, security groups and NACLs both use sets of inbound and outbound rules to control traffic to and from resources in a VPC.
Network security is critical to operating in the cloud. There are many different ways you can secure your network, but the best approach is to layer multiple methods. The more layers implemented in your security, the harder it is for malicious actors to access your network.
Cloud misconfiguration is the number one cause of data breaches involving public cloud services such as those offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. According to Neil MacDonald at Gartner, “nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement and mistakes.”
We love clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure for more reasons than we can count. Because the cloud is 100% software, we can program it to respond to our application requirements automatically. Developers can innovate really fast, spinning resources up and down on demand, and we only pay for what we use.
Most enterprises are already using public cloud computing services at scale or are planning to adopt the cloud soon. As an executive, chances are you’re paying attention to the Capital One data breach and wondering how this event should impact your decision-making.
UPDATE: August 26, 2019Since posting this, AWS has made some public statements regarding the breach that shed some light on what likely happened. From their response to Senator Ron Wyden, AWS stated:"As Capital One outlined in their public announcement, the attack occurred due to a misconfiguration error at the application layer of a firewall installed by Capital One, exacerbated by permissions set by Capital One that were likely broader than intended. After gaining access through the misconfigured firewall and having broader permission to access resources, we believe a SSRF attack was used (which is one of several ways an attacker could have potentially gotten access to data once they got in through the misconfigured firewall." "As discussed above, SSRF was not the primary factor in...
Today we announced that Fugue now supports Microsoft Azure, in addition to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our customers increasingly use multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), and they want a single Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution that spans multiple CSPs. Now Fugue for Microsoft Azure is now generally available, and we’re thrilled to deliver that to our customers.
