Implementing the AWS Foundations CIS Benchmarks will help you improve your cloud security posture in your AWS infrastructure. What entry points can attackers use to compromise your cloud infrastructure? Do all your users have multi-factor authentication setup? Are they using it? Are you providing more permissions that needed? Those are some questions this benchmark will help you answer. Keep reading for an overview on AWS CIS Benchmarks and tips to implement it.
Implementing effective threat detection for AWS requires visibility into all of your cloud services and containers. An application is composed of a number of elements: hosts, virtual machines, containers, clusters, stored information, and input/output data streams. When you add configuration and user management to the mix, it’s clear that there is a lot to secure!
GCP audit logs are a powerful tool that track everything happening in your cloud infrastructure. By analyzing them, you can detect and react to threats. Modern cloud applications are not just virtual machines, containers, binaries, and data. When you migrated to the cloud, you accelerated the development of your apps and increased operational efficiency. But you also started using new assets in the cloud that need securing.
Lateral movement is a growing concern with cloud security. That is, once a piece of your cloud infrastructure is compromised, how far can an attacker reach? What often happens in famous attacks to Cloud environments is a vulnerable application that is publicly available can serve as an entry point. From there, attackers can try to move inside the cloud environment, trying to exfiltrate sensitive data or use the account for their own purpose, like crypto mining.
One of the major concerns when moving to the cloud is how to approach AWS S3 security. Companies may have moved their workflows to Amazon, but are still cautious about moving their data warehouse. And that is totally understandable. We have all heard about data breaches in companies like Facebook, GoDaddy, and Pocket. It’s important that access to information is done properly, in a limited and controlled fashion, to avoid such breaches.
AWS Fargate is a technology that you can use with Amazon ECS to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing. In short, users offload the virtual machines management to AWS while focusing on task management.
Today, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon ECS Exec, a powerful feature to allow developers to run commands inside their ECS containers. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service by Amazon Web Services. ECS allows you to organize and operate container resources on the AWS cloud, and allows you to mix Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate workloads for high scalability.
CVE-2020-13942 is a critical vulnerability that affects the Apache open source application Unomi, and allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. In the versions prior to 1.5.1, Apache Unomi allowed remote attackers to send malicious requests with MVEL and OGNL expressions that could contain arbitrary code, resulting in Remote Code Execution (RCE) with the privileges of the Unomi application.
The privilege escalation category inside MITRE ATT&CK covers quite a few techniques an adversary can use to escalate privileges inside a system. Familiarizing yourself with these techniques will help secure your infrastructure. MITRE ATT&CK is a comprehensive knowledge base that analyzes all of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that advanced threat actors could possibly use in their attacks.
