The Sysdig 2024 Cloud‑Native Security and Usage Report highlights the evolving threat landscape, but more importantly, as the adoption of cloud-native technologies such as container and Kubernetes continue to increase, not all organizations are following best practices. This is ultimately handing attackers an advantage when it comes to exploiting containers for resource utilization in operations such as Kubernetes.

In the fast-paced world of application development, the use of open source components offers a quick path to building sophisticated applications. However, this approach introduces critical questions about software composition, licensing, and security. Before pushing any new application to production or even staging, the security and compliance teams alongside the application owner must address the following: This is where the importance of a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) becomes clear.

The cloud security market is still maturing and growing at a rapid pace. New security jargon, solutions, vendors, and acronyms are constantly appearing, making it difficult to have a clear sense of what approach to cloud security is best for your own organization. Cloud-native application platforms (CNAPPs) are one of the most recent categories in this space.

As cloud-native applications continue to proliferate, containers are becoming the preferred option to package and deploy these applications because of the agility and scalability they offer. In fact, Gartner predicts that 75% of global organizations are running containerized applications in production. The popularity of containers has also attracted hackers looking for new ways to exploit applications.

Kubernetes security is a critical part of the app lifecycle, through the build, deployment and runtime stages. Kubernetes runtime environments are dynamic and continuously changing. As clusters are replaced and permissions reassigned, security becomes an innate part of DevOps. It is important to ensure that malware and other malicious attacks do not access the cloud, as they might lead to system failures, servers going down, and more.

On January 16, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent out a Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) about active threat actors deploying the AndroxGh0st malware. This is significant as cyber criminals are actively using this malware to target Laravel (CVE-2018-15133) (an open source PHP framework).env files and obtain credentials for various high profile applications like Office365, SendGrid, and Twilio.

Nowadays, most of the applications are deployed on containers and orchestrated using Kubernetes or similar technology. Due to this, the performance, stability, and scalability are highly increased. But, it also widens up the attack surface if proper security controls, techniques, tools, and practices are not followed/used. So, if your application is running on containers or if you are thinking about deploying containers, then learning about container security best practices is a must.