The cloud has introduced entirely new environments, roles and circumstances that require us to reimagine the definition of privileged access management (PAM) and how to apply those principles to secure identities. PAM was built on the notion that identities must be secured, not just managed, to protect an organization’s most valuable assets. The well-recognized values of PAM remain highly desirable – least privilege, role-based access control and auditability of high-risk sessions.

As organizations adopt Microsoft AKS at scale, they need to enforce namespace or even workload-based isolation for better security and compliance. This isolation, often referred to as microsegmentation, can help prevent the lateral movement of threats inside Kubernetes clusters, achieve compliance by limiting communication across workloads or namespaces, and enable multi-tenancy by limiting communication.

Starting on Aug 25, 2023, we started to notice some unusually big HTTP attacks hitting many of our customers. These attacks were detected and mitigated by our automated DDoS system. It was not long however, before they started to reach record breaking sizes — and eventually peaked just above 201 million requests per second. This was nearly 3x bigger than our previous biggest attack on record.

Earlier today, Cloudflare, along with Google and Amazon AWS, disclosed the existence of a novel zero-day vulnerability dubbed the “HTTP/2 Rapid Reset” attack. This attack exploits a weakness in the HTTP/2 protocol to generate enormous, hyper-volumetric Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Modern cloud applications are made up of thousands of distributed services and resources that support an equally large volume of concurrent requests. This level of scale makes it more challenging for engineers to identify system failures before they lead to costly outages. System failures are often difficult to predict in cloud environments, and security threats add another layer of complexity.

One of the major concerns of multi-cloud companies is security. 69% of organizations admitted to experiencing data breaches or exposures due to multi-cloud security configurations.