Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Containerization has gone mainstream, and Kubernetes won out as the orchestration leader. Building and operating applications this way provides massive elasticity, scalability, and efficiency in an ever accelerating technology world. Although DevOps teams have made great strides in harnessing the new tools, the benefits don’t come without challenges and tradeoffs.

On March 22, the hacking group Lapsus$ published a Twitter post with a number of screenshots taken from a computer showing “superuser/admin” access to various systems at authentication firm Okta that took place in January this year. Okta is a platform in the #1 platform in Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) category, which means that it manages access to internal and external systems with one login.

By 2023, over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud native approaches. To put that in perspective, more applications will be developed on the cloud in a four-year period (2019-2023) than the total number of apps produced in the past 40 years. Clearly, organizations are buying into the cloud. But the question is: Do they fully understand it? And do they know how to secure the applications they built within it?

Infrastructure security is something that is important to get right so that attacks can be prevented—or, in the case of a successful attack—damage can be minimized. It is especially important in a Kubernetes environment because, by default, a large number of Kubernetes configurations are not secure. Securing Kubernetes at the infrastructure level requires a combination of host hardening, cluster hardening, and network security.

On March 21st, President Biden released a warning about the possibility of Russian cyber warfare attacks against targets in the West as a response to sanctions. This is apparently backed by “evolving intelligence” and specifically mentions American companies and critical infrastructure.

IT leaders have historically managed all infrastructure decisions across storage, network, compute and other aspects of the cloud. But this isn’t necessarily the case today. As organizations move away from on-premise cloud infrastructure and adopt cloud-native technologies, modern developers are playing a larger role in decision-making — especially when it comes to policy decisions like the control of cloud-based tools and the code that runs on them.

Containerization describes the creation of a self-contained computing environment that runs on a host machine and any operating system (OS) with an available container runtime engine. Built from an image, a container holds an app and the filesystem alongside configurations, dependencies, binaries, and other specifications needed to run it successfully. Containers are typically much smaller than virtual machines and run in the host’s OS rather than containing OSs themselves.