Best practices for securing an AWS environment have been well-documented and generally accepted, such as AWS’s guidance. However, organizations may still find it challenging on how to begin applying this guidance to their specific environments. In this blog series, we’ll analyze anonymized data from Netskope customers that include security settings of 650,000 entities from 1,143 AWS accounts across several hundred organizations.

Detecting when an unauthorized third party is accessing your AWS account is critical to ensuring your account remains secure. For example, an attacker may have gained access to your environment and created a backdoor to maintain persistence within your environment. Another common (and more frequent) type of unauthorized access can happen when a developer sets up a third-party tool and grants it access to your account to monitor your infrastructure for operations or optimize your bill.

Software as a service (SaaS) is one of the most important parts of the modern digital business. Unfortunately, when it comes to cybercrime, it can also be one of the weakest. The Cybersecurity newsletter, The Hacker News, have highlighted this in detail, noting interest from across the digital industry in addressing the holes created by misconfigured SaaS setups.

Recently, Amazon AWS introduced the new feature EC2 Serial Console for instances using Nitro System. It provides a simple and secure way to perform troubleshooting by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance. Even though this feature is useful in case of break glass situations, from a security perspective, it could be used by adversaries to gain access through an unguarded secondary entrance.

Gartner recently published the 2021 Strategic Roadmap for SASE Convergence, outlining key challenges that are driving shifts to Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) architecture. Not surprisingly, chief among these challenges are consistency, simplicity, transparency, and efficacy—all of which a properly implemented SASE architecture is positioned to solve. But knowing what the challenges are, how do we then get to SASE? Has your journey already started? What are the right moves?

BazarLoader is a malicious dropper used in multiple campaigns, including the massive wave of attacks targeting US Hospitals with the Ryuk ransomware during October 2020. The primary purpose of BazarLoader is to download and execute additional malware payloads, and one of the key characteristics is its delivery mechanism, which exploits legitimate cloud services like Google Docs to host the malicious payload.