The Essential Guide to Cloud Security Posture Management

How CSPM automates security configuration across clouds

"Cloud Security Posture Management, or CSPM, is a relatively new cloud security
category designed to address configuration and compliance risks in your cloud infrastructure. The concept of CSPM is to enable organizations to automatically discover, assess, and remediate security configuration issues and gaps across multiple cloud providers and accounts. This approach ensures that at any given moment you have a consistent, secure, and compliant cloud infrastructure."

https://info.aquasec.com/cspm-essential-guide

#aws #gcp #azure

🔸AWS Security Maturity Roadmap 2021

The third annual release of Scott Piper’s excellent guide for securely running on AWS. Probably one of the best, concise, actionable guides on this I know of.

https://summitroute.com/blog/2021/01/12/2021_aws_security_maturity_roadmap_2021/

#aws

🔸Auditing PassRole: A Problematic Privilege Escalation Permission

iam:PassRole is an AWS permission that enables critical privilege escalation; many supposedly low-privilege identities tend to have it. The PassRole permission requirement is ubiquitous. It extends to more than 300 actions in more than 90 services and, in some cases, is obscured by parameters that indirectly contain the role being passed. Comprehensively auditing it can be a handful but is absolutely worth it as not doing so means leaving relatively easy avenues for privilege escalation wide open.

https://ermetic.com/whats-new/blog/auditing-passrole-a-problematic-privilege-escalation-permission/

#aws

🔸Top Ten Security Updates from AWS re:Invent 2020

AWS re:Invent ran for three weeks last year. It is more important than ever to help everyone by summarizing AWS' biggest security announcements.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-ten-security-updates-from-aws-reinvent-2020-phil-rodrigues/

#aws

🔹🔴Abusing cloud services to fly under the radar

NCC Group and Fox-IT have been tracking a threat group with a wide set of interests, from intellectual property (IP) from victims in the semiconductors industry through to data from the airline industry. In their intrusions they regularly abuse cloud services from Google and Microsoft to achieve their goals.

https://research.nccgroup.com/2021/01/12/abusing-cloud-services-to-fly-under-the-radar/

#gcp #azure

🔸Compliance-as-code and auto-remediation with Cloud Custodian

AWS blog post about using Cloud Custodian + Lambdas to enforce compliance-as-code and auto-remediation. Cloud Custodian is an open source, stateless rules engine that offers policy-level execution against multiple kinds of event streams, including CloudWatch Events, CloudTrail events, and more.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/compliance-as-code-and-auto-remediation-with-cloud-custodian/

#aws

82% of companies unknowingly give 3rd parties access to all their cloud data

The Wiz team conducted a research of permissions provided to 3rd party vendors in cloud environments and the results should be a wake-up call. In the majority of cases these permissions are there for no reason: the vendor doesn't actually need them, and the customers aren't even aware that they gave them to the vendor.

https://wiz.io/blog/82-of-companies-unknowingly-give-3rd-parties-access-to-all-their-cloud-data/

#aws #gcp #azure

🔸Security Overview of AWS
Lambda

An In-Depth Look at AWS Lambda Security, February 2021

This whitepaper presents a deep dive into the AWS Lambda service through a security lens. It provides a well-rounded picture of the service, which is useful for new adopters, and deepens understanding of Lambda for current users. The intended audience for this whitepaper is Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), information security groups, security engineers, enterprise architects, compliance teams, and any others interested in understanding the underpinnings of AWS Lambda.

#aws

🔴GCP OAuth Token Hijacking in Google Cloud

If an attacker compromises an engineer's workstation, they can easily steal and abuse cached credentials, even if MFA is enabled (Part 1, Part 2).

https://www.netskope.com/blog/gcp-oauth-token-hijacking-in-google-cloud-part-1

🔴Google Kubernetes Engine IAM Roles

What separates the GKE IAM Roles "Kubernetes Engine Developer" from "Kubernetes Engine Admin"? In most cases, not that much.

https://darkbit.io/blog/kubernetes-engine-iam-roles

🔴Google Cloud IAM Custom Role and Permissions Debugging Tricks

An approach for creating and verifying least-privilege custom IAM Roles using the gcloud sdk Docker image, Data Access Logging, and the IAM Policy Troubleshooter.

https://darkbit.io/blog/google-cloud-custom-iam-role-debugging-tricks

#gcp

The CSA Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) V4: Raising the cloud security bar to the next level

The Cloud Security Alliance released version 4 of the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM). The upgrade from CCM v3.0.1 to v4 has been imperative considering the evolution of the cloud security landscape, both from the technical and legal and regulatory standpoint. There was also a need for organizations to make the implementation of security and privacy controls more efficient and streamline compliance.

https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/blog/2021/01/21/the-csa-cloud-controls-matrix-ccm-v4-raising-the-cloud-security-bar-to-the-next-level/

🔹How We Escaped Docker in Azure Functions

Vulnerability in Azure Functions which would allow an attacker to escalate privileges and escape the Azure Functions Docker container to the Docker host. Microsoft has determined that the vulnerability has no security impact on Function users as the Docker host itself is protected by a Hyper-V boundary.

https://www.intezer.com/blog/research/how-we-escaped-docker-in-azure-functions/

#azure

🔸Cloud Security Table Top Exercises

A great list of scenarios to think through by Matt Fuller, including:

- Malicious VPC peering request
- Compromised Lambda Layers
- Injected CloudFormation Templates
- Broken CloudTrail Logs
- and a bunch more

https://matthewdf10.medium.com/cloud-security-table-top-exercises-629d353c268e?

#aws

🔴New whitepaper: Designing and deploying a data security strategy with Google Cloud

New 23 page whitepaper from the GCP team: “we wanted to explore both the question of starting a data security program in a cloud-native way, as well as adjusting your existing daily security program when you start utilizing cloud computing.” It covers the 3 pillars of effective cloud security (Identity, Boundary and Access, Visibility), controls that enable the pillars, rethinking your data security strategy, and more.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/start-a-data-security-program-in-a-cloud-native-way-on-google-cloud

#gcp

🔸AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs)

Nice overview page of SCPs by Marco Lancini covering what they are, what they can’t do, and example policies like denying API calls from root users, denying the ability to disrupt CloudTrail or GuardDuty, and more.

https://cloudsecdocs.com/aws/devops/resources/scps/

#aws

🔸Building a secure CI/CD pipeline for Terraform Infrastructure as Code

How the OVO team created a model for delivering infrastructure changes with robust security practices, and used to it build a secure Terraform CI/CD solution for AWS.

https://tech.ovoenergy.com/building-a-secure-ci-cd-pipeline-for-terraform-infrastructure-as-code/

#aws

🔸Security Logging in Cloud Environments - AWS

Post by Marco Lancini describing how to design a multi-account security-related logging platform in AWS. He discusses various services (CloudTrail, CloudWatch, GuardDuty, Config), access logs, collecting logs, long-term storage and audit trail, and monitoring and alerting.

https://www.marcolancini.it/2021/blog-security-logging-cloud-environments-aws/

#aws

CISO’s Guide to Cloud Security Transformation

New whitepaper by GCP covering: “prepare your company culture for cloud security, evolve how your company works, evolve key security roles and responsibilities, and design your security operating model.”

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/cisos-guide-to-cloud-security-transformation

🔴Lateral Movement & Privilege Escalation in GCP; Compromise Organizations without Dropping an Implant

"In this talk, we'll demonstrate several techniques to perform identity compromise via the ActAs permission, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and widespread project compromise in Google Cloud. We will also release tools for exploitation."

https://youtu.be/kyqeBGNSEIc

#gcp