Microsoft released a valuable new Azure feature in December of 2021: custom security attributes. This feature is still in preview. Custom security attributes enable organizations to define new attributes to meet their needs. These attributes can be used to store information or, more notably, implement access controls with Azure attribute-based access control (ABAC). Azure ABAC, which is also in preview, enables an organization to define access rules based on the value of an object’s attribute.

While the digital world provides many benefits, there are also various risks involved within the third-party risk category. Also, the category of the risks can be quite long i.e. financial, environmental, security risk and reputational. Firms are often required to open their network and share data related to the company, employees, customers etc. which puts them at significant risk of cybersecurity issues, breaches and loss of sensitive data.

Often referred to as AuthN (authentication) and AuthZ (authorization) in the modern access control paradigm, both authentication and authorization are a method to control access to resources. These resources can be files, programs, web applications, mobile applications, operating systems, network devices, etc. Let’s explore three common scenarios on how authentication and authorization are involved. These are the few sample cases of authentication vs. authorization.

Weekly round-up of the most noteworthy cyber security headlines.

Despite the growing interest in cloud accounts by opportunistic and state-sponsored actors, too many organizations fail to implement basic security measures to protect their cloud apps, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) for administrators and users. This is the concerning finding of a report recently released by Microsoft, according to which just 22% of Azure Active Directory customers implement strong authentication mechanisms such as MFA or passwordless authentication.

The migration to cloud provides faster time to deployment and elasticity, but often at some cost and complexity to infrastructure control and visibility. A concrete example we can use is a deployment of web servers with rational security group configuration, in light of the recent Log4Shell vulnerability. While limitations are similar in all IaaS environments, consider the following AWS architecture with focus on the web servers running on EC2 instances.