Three main challenges of Cloud Security

 Introduction

In today’s business landscape, cloud security is more important than ever. However, the cloud introduces a new level of complexity which can create significant risk:

1. Too many surfaces to defend
2. Too many tools and siloes between teams
3. Too little context about infrastructure, apps, and data.

This complexity makes it difficult to secure the organization’s most important assets: their data. The best way to combat these risks? Simplify your organization’s cloud security posture!

Challenge 1 – Too many surfaces to defend

The first challenge is the sheer number of surfaces that must be defended. In the past, organizations only had to worry about securing their on-premises infrastructure. And usually, they would do that with a perimeter network design. However, with the cloud, organizations must now secure their data in a dynamic exchange between cloud storage, transit, and use. The opportunities for attackers are immense.

Organizations are started to leverage a Zero Trust design of their cloud infrastructure. Zero Trust design is about giving each user, application, and device the same level of scrutiny. This means there is no longer a “trusted” or “untrusted” network. All networks are treated as untrusted, and all users, applications, and devices must be authenticated…and authorized…before they can access data or resources. This concept makes it more difficult for companies to leverage and validate their design.

Challenge 2 – Too many tools and siloes between teams

The number of tools and siloes between teams has led to a lack of coordination between these teams. This can lead to a situation where each team uses different tools, leading to difficulties in reporting, tracking and auditing.

Organizations run an average of six different tools or features to secure their public cloud environments. Despite this multiple tool implementation, 96% of decision-makers still report that their organizations faced security incidents in the last 12 months:

1. 45% of businesses have experienced a cloud-based data breach or failed audit over the past year (2022 Thales Cloud Security Study)
2. Between 2020 and 2021, ransomware-related data leaks increased 82% and interactive intrusion campaigns increased 45%.

More tools result in a fragmented view of your overall cloud environment and various risk assessments….it does not necessarily provide a higher security posture.

Challenge 3 – Too little context about infrastructure, apps and data

Different tools for each domain can increase the visibility in that specific domain but can lead to the lack of context and correlation of findings. It is very hard and time-consuming for security professionals to prioritize risks correctly and efficiently. Also, it is difficult to understand the relationship between different systems and data. This can make it difficult to identify malicious activity and respond to incidents in a timely manner.

What is the solution?

The solution to these challenges is to 1.)simplify your organization’s needs, 2.)reduce the number of tools they are using and 3.)increase the visibility and context of their data.

One way to simplify your organization’s security posture is to validate your cloud security from an attacker’s viewpoint, especially continuously validating the security posture of the cloud with offensive tools from an attacker’s perspective. These offensive (attacker perspective) tools will provide you a comprehensive (continuous, scalable, multiple cloud locations) overview of how strong your cloud security is and where attackers can exploit potential weaknesses.

This approach will allow organizations to prioritize and fix their highest risk priorities that can cause serious damage to their reputation and integrity.

9 tips for assessing your modern cloud security toolsets

Cloud specific security tooling is essential for protecting your cloud application and data. Today, organizations in the cloud use multiple open source tools to secure their cloud ecosystem across several domains. This includes workload protection, infrastructure protection, application protection, static code analysis and security incident management. How are you evaluating your cloud security toolsets? Here are 9 tips used in the industry to evaluate whether your system is effective…or not!

1. Transparency

With security toolings protecting data from unauthorized access (and most likely several data losses), it inherently has access to sensitive customer information. Tools can only be effective if they are transparent to users. If users are not aware of the tool’s presence, they may inadvertently bypass its security features. Additionally, transparency allows users to see how the tool works and understand its capabilities. To better understand “transparency” of your tool, you should ask yourself two questions:

How does the cloud security vendor manage “operator access” to the data?

Ideally, all the data should be encrypted, however many security tools process sensitive data in clear text. For such systems, it’s prudent for vendor systems and operators to have a process for granting access to authorized users. Your system should ensure that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive data (monitoring operator activity and revoking access if needed).

How is multi-tenancy managed, especially if you use a SAAS security platform?

More and more security businesses are turning to SAAS. With many customer databases kept by SAAS firms, a robust multi-tenant architecture at scale is required. It’s critical to keep 1.)network segmentation, 2.)identity and access segmentation, and 3.)data segregation in place across the tenants so that one tenant’s breach or outage does not have a downstream impact on the other tenants.

How are secrets and data encryption keys managed?

It’s critical to maintain a lifecycle of secrets and encryption keys. Understanding your system’s key creations, rotation policies, access methods, and data deletion procedures ensures that your data protection plan can face various crisis situations.

2. Customization

Security solutions should be adaptable enough to meet your company’s specific control needs and culture. To ensure that it is most beneficial for your users, you may modify the security programs and projects to match your organization’s particular infrastructure. Tailoring integrations with existing systems for logging, monitoring, asset managing and incident responding is critical to fostering successful collaborations.

3. API Driven

The advantages of API-powered security solutions are numerous. First, they may be readily integrated with existing SDLC processes via well-defined API connections. You may use your present infrastructure to boost its capacity and functionality by utilizing this connection. Second, tools that are powered by APIs can automate the tasks that would otherwise be performed by security analysts.

4. Managed service

Modern businesses choose to enable security services in a managed approach. This includes using an intuitive, agentless method to relieve the strain on their ops teams. Managed services are frequently less expensive than buying and maintaining your own security tools. These service providers keep the tools up to date with the most recent security enhancements, detections, findings, and fixes for your specific operations.

5. Understand end-to-end attack paths

The accuracy of risk ratings from security solutions are limited unless they are aware of how cyber attacks operate (and how they can be prevented). These “risk ratings” should focus on a specific sector such as network security, static code analysis, vulnerability monitoring or IAM security. By understanding the end-to-end attack path, the tool can identify potential security vulnerabilities and take steps to mitigate them. Additionally, this understanding can help the tool provide better protection against future attacks and check the effectiveness of your zero trust controls.

6. Contextual to your core business

Your security tool for your business vertical should support your required security standards for your industry (such as NIST, HIPPA, PCI, and ISO). Your tools should create the functionality, business processes and reporting dashboard curated to achieve these security objectives. This contextualization enables the software to more effectively defend against aberrant behaviors that are more likely in your industry sector.

7. Shift-left the security

Shift-left toolsets significantly cut down the time and effort necessary to identify and address risks in production run times. Shift-left security tools seamlessly integrate with the developer experience around CI/CD pipelines. They should be seamless with their IDEs of developer environments to provide comprehensive security feedback as the code is being written.

8. Visibility and control over hybrid-cloud deployments

The hybrid cloud is here to stay, particularly for the crown jewels of legacy data and systems that are still on-premises. The cloud/on-premise integration will endure for a long time into the future.

A cloud-based/on-premise security solution’s centralized “single pane of glass” management console should let you see all of your assets in one spot—regardless of where they’re located.

9. Cost-effective

One of the advantages of utilizing “As A Service” security solutions is that they are cost-effective. By NOT relying on a traditional volume licensing model, SAAS delivers adequate security defense without breaking the bank The pay-as-you-go feature of these toolsets allows for a more predictable and manageable security budget.

Cloud Compliance

 Cloud technology has expanded business capabilities across all industries. However, taking full advantage of the cloud means paying attention to compliance issues that can vary according to your industry and other factors. Without a stringent cloud compliance system in place, you could be making both your business and your customers vulnerable to data breaches and other security-related problems. That is why it is important to have a general understanding of cloud compliance along with a deeper understanding of what it means to your business in particular.

Essentially, cloud compliance means that any cloud-delivered system must be compliant with standards that are specific to each customer. For example, healthcare facilities have to comply with HIPAA standards which are designed to protect the patient’s privacy. HIPAA has strict guidelines concerning how patient data is stored and shared. As a result, any cloud system will need to enact security protocols that will allow cloud systems to effectively comply with HIPAA standards.

It is important to note that compliance is often an ongoing challenge. Security threats are not static and new vulnerabilities can become exposed as technology changes and hackers look for new ways to infiltrate systems. In addition, emerging industry standards and new government regulations can require a constant reassessment of compliance issues in order to stay up-to-date.

Many companies are dealing with the challenges of cloud compliance by creating new positions or outsourcing their compliance issues to specialized companies. Chief Compliance Officers are being assigned to oversee compliance-related challenges and prevent any mistakes. At the same time, companies are looking to free up their IT team and allow them to focus on other areas of the business by hiring outside companies to deal with cloud compliance. These companies are tasked with understanding the industry and all relevant compliance standards. For industries with more complex compliance issues that are subject to change, outsourcing can be an invaluable tool.

Infrastructure As Code Best Practices

 Development and deployment cycles are running at faster rates than ever before. Through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), businesses are able to create and implement applications at a rapid rate. While this is driving innovation, it is also creating new challenges. The faster ideas are traveling through the CI/CD pipeline, the less time there is to address emerging security concerns. This is why Infrastructure as Code Security (IaC) is becoming an increasingly important part of DevOps. Learn more about IaC and how you can leverage it to improve security without having to slow the pace of growth.

Security Best Practices for IaC

You can take full advantage of IaC and improve security by implementing these best practices:

1- Continuous compliance. The best way to ensure compliance is to create clear standards for each stop along the pipeline. Continually reassessing compliance throughout the process according to predetermined rules is an excellent first step toward improved security. This will also allow you to test code against identified threats in a sandbox environment before fully implementing changes.

2- Least privilege principle. To make the process easier, usually DevOps engineers have a master account connecting to the cloud provider and provisioning all the resources with that master account. While this is a fast and easy approach, it is not the most secure approach. The recommendation is to have a set of different accounts with various Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in place. These allow you to run the IaC code with a minimum privilege access mindset.

3- Monitor and update cloud security and compliance tests. It is also important to address security at the cloud environment level. This should include constant risk assessment and threat modeling. As new users are added and changes are made, you should continue to adjust access control and update firewalls.

4- Keeping secrets in a vault. While connecting to a cloud provider, you need secrets for the initial authentication and accessing resources. These secrets should be kept in a vault for maximum security and all the vault communication should be encrypted as well. Also, you should think about the rotation of secrets to prevent exposing them in the long run.

5- Require encryption. With modern encryption tools, there is no reason not to encrypt all data that is transmitted in the cloud. This is an essential tool that will protect sensitive data and add a layer of protection.

6- Automate alerts. There tool that will update your model repository as the IT and security communities learn about new threats. In addition, AI can be used to identify any abnormalities and automatically trigger alerts. These are important tools that incorporate security into the everyday flow of CI/CD.

7- Staging environments. It is highly recommended to have separate environments for development, QA and Production. Keep in mind, IaC always starts from the development environment and then goes to QA and production. Never deploy something to higher environments while you were not testing that in lower environments.

8- Remove the manual access to the cloud portal. In higher environments (QA, Prod) if developers and DevOps engineers have access to manually change the configurations, you could see configuration drifts from the IaC templates down the line. Always remove individual contributor access to higher environments and just give your developers the Read permission to validate resources manually. If they need to change something, it should go through the IaC process.

IaC provides businesses with the potential to accelerate DevOps and continuously update and improve applications without skipping a beat. This sort of fast-paced environment inevitably creates new security concerns, but there are existing tools and techniques that will allow you to take advantage of IaC while also addressing and reducing security risks. With the right security plan in place, you can confidently use IaC and remain flexible, scalable, and safe.

For additional help designing and implementing an IaC security plan, contact the experts at prancer.

Cloud Security Testing

In many cases, a cyber attack is only successful if a user takes a certain action, including clicking on a malicious link or entering information into a cloned website. However, with drive-by cyber attacks, malware is spread by targeting websites with security vulnerabilities and without requiring any action on the part of the user. This makes drive-by attacks an especially problematic and insidious type of hack and threat to cloud security. Keep reading to learn more about how this type of cyber attack works and what you can do to prevent your website from being targeted.

Hackers can only initiate a drive-by attack if the website is insecure. They will look for gaps in cloud security that will allow them to insert malicious scripts into the website code. This script can be used to automatically download malware onto the computer of a visitor to the site or redirect visitors to an alternative site that has been created by the hackers. Either way, both the website and the users are victims.

Drive-by downloads are also dangerous because they aren’t limited to website pages. They can also be triggered when a user views an email or looks at a pop-up window. Any app, web browser or operating system can be hijacked and used by the hacker.

How to Prevent Drive-By Attacks

For businesses and website owners, the best way to prevent drive-by cyber attacks is to make sure that your security, browser, and operating systems are up to date. It can be all too easy to forget about updates or fail to double-check that updates were successful, which can create just the sort of security vulnerabilities that make drive-by attacks possible. Be sure to not only schedule updates but make sure to review them to ensure compliance.

In addition, businesses should make sure to remove outdated aspects of the website. As you update or add new software, older tools should be removed. If they are left on the site and not updated with emerging security patches, you have created an easy way to exploit the site. Even if these components are not in use, they can still be used by hackers to insert malware.

It should go without saying that secure passwords are also at the heart of preventing cyber attacks, but some businesses still fail to enforce strong password use. A password generator and management tool can go a long way in supporting cloud security and preventing hackers from guessing weak passwords and easily gaining access to website code.

Finally, be aware of the types of advertisements that your users are being served. While publishing ads on your site can be a great way to generate passive income, this is also a common path for malware. Take the time to monitor the ads that are being shown on your site and make sure that your users aren’t being targeted with ad-based drive-by attacks.

Users should also make sure that browsers and operating systems are running the latest versions. In addition, they should minimize the number of apps and programs on your devices. The more programs you have running, the more likely you are to be the target of a drive-by attack. Pop-up blockers can also be an effective tool to reduce the risk of drive-by cyber attacks.

While drive-by cyber attacks are difficult to identify and prevent, there are steps that both businesses and users can take to reduce the risk of becoming a victim of this type of attack. For more information about different types of cyberattacks, how to prevent them, and ways to ensure compliance, contact the experts at prance . We help businesses across all industries improve cloud security and compliance in ways that also support the DevOps pipeline.

Security Compliance

Prancer Enterprise is announcing that its entire cloud compliance policies repository is now open source. The repository is available on GitHub at

https://github.com/prancer-io/prancer-compliance-test

This move reflects Prancer’s commitment to open source technology and harness the power of community collaboration to move great ideas through the pipeline faster.

These compliance policies that focused on IaC Security and live cloud resources are based on CIS, NIST 800, PCI, HIPPA, HITRUST, CSA CCM and ISO 27001 compliance standards. These policies are all in REGO Open Policy Agent (OPA) language.

Prancer Enterprise platform helps companies achieve end-to-end security in the cloud by shifting security to the left and apply it early in the development process. Cloud DevOps engineers could have an early feedback on the security of the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates with every commit they are making to the code.

Prancer Enterprise Cloud Compliance repository has more than 1000 policies both on the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security and post-deployment resources. This unique Cloud compliance policy repository is the most significant contribution to the open-source community based on the de facto Rego policy language.

IaC Security policies cover Azure, AWS and Google Clouds. Kubernetes Objects are also supported in the IaC Security. Post-deployment security scans based on these cloud providers help businesses to increase cloud security posture and maintaining security in the cloud.

As more companies begin to rely on cloud technologies, they are also looking for ways to apply compliance to their cloud environment easily and make it a secure place for their workloads. Prancer Platform helps companies to leverage security throughout the lifecycle of their cloud deployment. Prancer Platform integrates into DevOps pipelines and provides IaC Security scan.

About Prancer

Prancer Enterprise (https://www.prancer.io/) provides a pre-deployment and post-deployment multi-cloud security platform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and live cloud environments. It shifts the security to the left and provides end-to-end security scanning based on the Policy as Code concept. DevOps engineers can use it for static code analysis on IaC to find security drifts and maintain their cloud security posture with continuous compliance features.

Offensive Security Testing

 

Prancer for Offensive Security Testing – An Overview

Offensive Security is a term used to describe the art of attacking and exploiting cyber systems. It is a broad field covering many different areas, including infrastructure security, application security, database security, etc.

Offensive Security tools are used by ethical hackers and penetration testers to test the security of systems and applications. The pentester must understand the application components to formulate the attack he wants to do. Also, the more information they have about the underlying technologies, the attacker can better develop the attack.

There are several open-source and commercial tools for offensive security. Two of the most popular tools in Offensive Security are:

Zaproxy: The ZED Attack Proxy (ZAP) is a powerful open-source penetration testing tool that security experts employ to identify vulnerabilities in web applications. In a nutshell, zap intercepts and examines messages that are sent between a browser and a web application, modifying the contents if necessary and then passing them on to the destination. Zap may be used in numerous pentesting situations, including as part of the OWASP top 10 web and API testing.

Burp Suite: Burp suite is a commercial integrated platform for performing security testing of web applications and APIs. It consists of several tools that allow the pentester to map the application, find vulnerabilities, and exploit them. Burp’s tools can be utilized in numerous ways to perform security testing tasks ranging from very simple to highly advanced and specialized.

There are many more tools to choose from, such as nmap, nslookup/dig, Selenium, Nikto, recon-ng, SpiderFoot, etc.

Offensive Security at scale

Manual pentesting may be more time-consuming and expensive than developing an automation suite. There are numerous tools available that can automate the majority of pentest activities, including security scanning against cloud architectures built on microservices and APIs. In turn, this ability to automate time-consuming manually intensive operations allows businesses to speed up their validation process while also reducing product release cycles

When it comes to the amount of data that can be stored, as well as the sheer scale of cloud CSPs, companies simply cannot keep up with the speed of innovation and the overall scale of the cloud. The only way to catch up with these factors is to automate the security testing as part of SDLC processes.