In a never-ending game of cat and mouse, threat actors are exploiting, controlling and maintaining persistent access in compromised cloud infrastructure. While cloud practitioners are armed with best-in-class knowledge, support, and security practices, it is statistically impossible to have a common security posture for all cloud instances worldwide. Attackers know this, and use it to their advantage. By applying evolved tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), attackers are exploiting edge cases.

In this blog post, I will be looking at 10 best practices for Kubernetes security policy design. Application modernization is a strategic initiative that changes the way enterprises are doing business. The journey requires a significant investment in people, processes, and technology in order to achieve the desired business outcomes of accelerating the pace of innovation, optimizing cost, and improving an enterprise’s overall security posture.

In a recent post by ZDI, researchers found an out-of-bounds access flaw (CVE-2021-31440) in the Linux kernel’s (5.11.15) implementation of the eBPF code verifier: an incorrect register bounds calculation occurs while checking unsigned 32-bit instructions in an eBPF program. The flaw can be leveraged to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code in the context of the kernel.

Since the release of CVE-2020-8554 on GitHub this past December, the vulnerability has received widespread attention from industry media and the cloud security community. This man-in-the-middle (MITM) vulnerability affects Kubernetes pods and underlying hosts, and all Kubernetes versions—including future releases—are vulnerable. Despite this, there is currently no patch for the issue.

In April 2020, MalwareHunterTeam found a number of suspicious files in an open directory and posted about them in a series of tweets. Trend Micro later confirmed that these files were part of the first cryptojacking malware by TeamTNT, a cybercrime group that specializes in attacking the cloud—typically using a malicious Docker image—and has proven itself to be both resourceful and creative.

The use of honeypots in an IT network is a well-known technique to detect bad actors within your network and gain insight into what they are doing. By exposing simulated or intentionally vulnerable applications in your network and monitoring for access, they act as a canary to notify the blue team of the intrusion and stall the attacker’s progress from reaching actual sensitive applications and data.

We are excited to introduce Calico Cloud, a pay-as-you-go SaaS platform for Kubernetes security and observability. With Calico Cloud, users only pay for services consumed and are billed monthly, getting immediate value without upfront investment.

A few weeks ago a solution engineer discovered a critical flaw in Kubernetes architecture and design, and announced that a “security issue was discovered with Kubernetes affecting multi-tenant clusters. If a potential attacker can already create or edit services and pods, then they may be able to intercept traffic from other pods (or nodes) in the cluster.” If a hostile user can create a ClusterIP service and set the spec.externalIP field, they can intercept traffic to that IP.

Companies are leveraging the power of Kubernetes to accelerate the delivery of resilient and scalable applications to meet the pace of business. These applications are highly dynamic, making it operationally challenging to securely connect to databases or other resources protected behind firewalls.

Kubernetes has become the world’s most popular container orchestration system and is taking the enterprise ecosystem by storm. At this disruptive moment it’s useful to look back and review the security threats that have evolved in this dynamic landscape. Identifying these threats and exploits and being a proactive learner may save you a lot of time and effort…as well as help you retain your reputation in the long run.