The biggest fundamental shift in the era of digital transformation is that data is no longer on a CPU that the enterprise owns. Security teams focused on cloud must invest in the right technology to achieve more complete data protection, and we all need to ensure Zero Trust principles are applied everywhere data needs protection. At Netskope, we describe this as Zero Trust Data Protection. In its simplest form, Zero Trust means: Don’t trust the things you do not need to trust.

In January and February of 2021, the threat actor called Hafnium used a number of post-exploitation tools after gaining access to Exchange servers through a zero-day exploit. One of their persistence methods was creating new user accounts in the domain, giving them the ability to log back into the network using normal authentication rather than use a web shell or continue to re-exploit the vulnerability (which has since been patched).

“Where necessity speaks, it demands”. This old saying seems particularly apt right now with the pandemic forcing organizations to completely change the way they think about their IT networks. That rapid shift to remote work has resulted in a massive demand for cloud-based services.

On March 2, Microsoft released patches to address four zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server software. Those vulnerabilities, known collectively as ProxyLogon, affect on-premises Exchange Server 2013, Exchange Server 2016, and Exchange Server 2019. (Exchange Online, which is part of Microsoft 365, has not been affected.)

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.

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!

Cloud-native threats have multiple implications. We are used to seeing legitimate cloud applications exploited within sophisticated kill chains, and we forget the basics: such as the risks posed by Shadow IT, like when personal email accounts are used to improperly handle corporate data. This is a very real risk right now, when users are working almost completely from home and the line between the professional and personal use of work devices is blurred.

Organizations are migrating an increasing amount of their infrastructure into the cloud. The cloud provides organizations with a number of benefits like greater scalability, improved reliability and faster time to value. However, these potential benefits can be offset if security is an afterthought.

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.

As we address a number of anniversaries related to the COVID-19 pandemic, you’re likely reminded of a lot of the uncertainty you were feeling coming into an indefinite work from home scenario. I know I certainly am.

Do you remember all the apprehension about cloud migration in the early days of cloud computing? Some of the concerns ran the full paranoia gamut from unreliability to massive overcharging for cloud services. Some concerns, such as the lack of security of the entire cloud infrastructure, rose to the level of conspiracy theories. It is nice to know that those myths are all behind us. Or are they? It seems that many of the earlier misconceptions have been replaced with new notions about the cloud.

In the last several years, companies have accelerated their cloud adoption and have invested time and resources to lift and shift their content, development and applications to public and private clouds. The onset of the global health crisis has further accelerated even the more traditional brick-and-mortar companies to invest in cloud technologies. Yet, we still see customers hosting content on on-premises repositories in spite of inexpensive per-GB cloud storage. Why is that?

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the number of cloud security resources available. How do you know which sources to trust? Which ones should inform your security strategies? Which reports will actually improve your cloud security posture? Let’s first look at six cloud security guides that you should be using. These resources provide action items that you can take back to your team and use immediately.

Not even seven days after its public release, the American Rescue Plan Act has already been exploited by cybercriminals. This is the latest example of using a relief measure as bait for phishing or malware delivery.

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.

In the summer of 2020, there was a big, short-lived spike in malicious Office documents. The Emotet crew had been quiet in the spring and began leveraging their botnet to send extremely convincing phishing emails to their victims, often with a link to download an invoice or other document from a popular cloud service. Those documents contained malicious code that installed backdoors, ransomware, bankers, and other malware on unsuspecting victims’ computers.

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.

Cloud security. Cloud architecture. Cloud storage. As you start scaling your business, you know “the cloud” is an important element of your IT capabilities. But, it can be a little confusing to understand the ins and outs of “the cloud” — especially when it comes to using cloud-based tools for your company to work remotely. Before we get into private vs public clouds, let’s quickly establish what we mean by cloud computing.

On this one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic declaration from the World Health Organization (WHO), let’s check back in on the remote work stats for the past year.

Leaky cloud services are a major concern these days. As more and more organizations move their data and applications to the cloud, ensuring new forms of collaboration and agility for their workforce, setup errors and misconfigurations (or even the lack of understanding of the shared responsibility model) pose a serious risk for the new, enlarged corporate perimeter. So far, in 2021, I have collected 12 major breaches fueled by cloud misconfigurations, and I wonder how many flew under the radar.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks allow an attacker to forge and submit requests as a logged-in user to a web application. CSRF exploits the fact that HTML elements send ambient credentials (like cookies) with requests, even cross-origin. Like XSS, to launch a CSRF attack the attacker has to convince the victim to either click on or navigate to a link.

As I’m writing this blog, malicious actors are actively exploiting vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Exchange Server software. These were zero-day exploits, which means that even organizations that were diligent in their patching were vulnerable. So far the estimates are that more than 60,000 organizations have been compromised.

As enterprises fast track cloud adoption plans without security considerations, we’ve seen the dangers of cloud misconfigurations and how it continues to cost millions in lost data and revenue for failure to comply. In this blog we’ll explain how to spot the telltale signs and secure your clouds with adequate Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM).

Cloud API logs are a significant blind spot for many organizations and often factor into large-scale, publicly announced data breaches. They pose several challenges to security teams: For all of these reasons, cloud API logs are resistant to conventional threat detection and hunting techniques.

Traditional security programs were predicated on protecting the typically internally hosted technology infrastructure and the data within that environment. This led to an ecosystem composed of numerous discrete tools and processes all intended to detect adversaries and prevent harm. It included a multitude of controls spanning network and infrastructure security, application security, access control, and process controls.

Amazon’s AWS Systems Manager, better known as SSM to long-time AWS users, was announced at the end of 2017, replacing the similarly named EC2 Systems Manager that had launched a year prior. Similar to other AWS products, System Manager provides a broad spectrum of features instead of a focused and opinionated product.

(Guest Blog) For decades, companies have relied on perimeter protection solutions to restrict their digital resources. These included passwords to authenticate users, intrusion detection systems and firewalls. With time, passwords became inadequate in preventing unauthorized access, and most shifted to two-factor authentication systems like one-time SMS codes or tokens. This change significantly enhanced security, but the approach only focused on securing the perimeter.

Hancitor (AKA CHanitor, Tordal) is a popular macro-based malware distributed via malicious Office documents delivered through malspam. In the latest campaigns, particularly active between October and December 2020, the malware has been distributed via DocuSign-themed emails asking the victims to review and sign a document. The fake DocuSign link downloads a Microsoft Word document whose malicious macro, once enabled, installs the Hancitor malware.

Every cloud has its own identity and access management system. AWS and Google use a bunch of JSON files specifying various rules. Open source projects like Kubernetes support three concurrent access control models - attribute-based, role-based and a webhook access control, all expressed using YAML. Some teams are going as far as inventing their own programming language to solve this evergreen problem.

Cloud security. Cloud architecture. Cloud storage. As you start scaling your business, you know “the cloud” is an important element of your IT capabilities. But, it can be a little confusing to understand the ins and outs of “the cloud” — especially when it comes to using cloud-based tools for your company to work remotely. Before we get into private vs public clouds, let’s quickly establish what we mean by cloud computing.

Misconfigurations remain one of the most common risks in the technology world. Simply telling organisations to “fix” this problem, however, is not as easy as it might first seem because there’s a myriad of technologies at play in modern infrastructure deployments. All of this results in a complicated mix of hardening approaches for each system. What is key, then, is to identify where hardening is required and then consider the methodology for each area.