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.
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.
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.
Container escape is a security risk in which malicious players can leverage a containerized application’s vulnerabilities to breach its isolation boundary, gaining access to the host system’s resources. Once an attacker accesses the host system, they can escalate their privilege to access other containers running in the machine or run harmful code on the host. Depending on how vulnerable the host is, the actor could also access other hosts in the network.
