We all know there are a number of different security devices that need to be continually monitored because they represent attack vectors. That’s why understanding configuration management is critical to security hygiene. As practitioners, we need to adhere to CIS controls as they provide a critical baseline for maintaining our security framework and keeping up our integrity monitoring processes.
New technologies often present interesting challenges for security teams, with cloud services such as AWS, Azure and GCP providing particularly novel cases in comparison to “classic” on-premise systems. As cloud services race to add new features that drive new customer interest and increase retention of existing clients, there is a very real risk of exposing new threat vectors to the business if even the most minor of misconfigurations occurs.
A lot has changed in the past few weeks. And the percentage of us working from home (WFH) has increased tremendously. With increased WFH, we rely more on email communication, and this increases the opportunities for abuse by others. One thing that has stayed constant: bad people want to do bad things. As we have seen in the past, when one avenue of attack is restricted, the fraudsters redouble their efforts in other areas, and online fraud attempts are already increasing during our new normal.
Oh what a difference a month makes! When we launched our new monthly open source vulnerabilities snapshot series last month, we didn’t imagine that the following post would be researched and written by an unexpectedly remote team.
If you were running a business that was not oriented to remote work, it has been completely turned upside down. Even if you were “remote-only”, it is likely going to be tough sledding for the foreseeable future given the resulting economic downturn.
Amidst all the pandemic doom and gloom, we finally have something positive come from the chaos: NERC filed a motion recently (April 6, 2020) to defer three Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Reliability Standards (as well as 1 PER, and 3 PRC standards) for three months due to the national emergency declared on March 13th by President Trump. As the original implementation date was July 1, 2020, this means that should FERC approve the motion, the new implementation date would be October 1, 2020.
One item that comes up a lot in conversations is how security teams or IT teams struggle to speak the “business language” to business leaders, mainly to members of the senior leadership that make the final decisions on spending and investments. This problem could have its roots in IT, and later security, teams historically having their management lines within the accounting department, ultimately being accountable to the Chief Financial Officer.
Calico is an open source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico supports a broad range of platforms including Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker EE, OpenStack, and bare metal. In this blog, we will focus on Kubernetes pod networking and network security using Calico. Calico uses etcd as the back-end datastore. When you run Calico on Kubernetes, you can use the same etcd datastore through the Kubernetes API server.
In Part 2 of this two-part series, our goal is to provide security practitioners with better visibility, knowledge, and capabilities relative to malicious persistence techniques that impact organizations around the world every day. In this post, we’ll explore two additional persistence techniques that are being used by attackers in the wild: Scheduled Tasks (T1053) and BITS Jobs (T1197).
