Few things in recent years have changed the game plan of the tech organization as much as the infrastructure as code movement. With infrastructure itself largely having moved into the cloud, automating provisioning, upgrades and management of that infrastructure was a natural next step.
Misconfigurations in infrastructure as code (IaC) can be just as dangerous as vulnerabilities in code. Small mistakes in configuration can lead to the sensitive data being readable on the internet, or private endpoints and dashboard accessible to the anonymous users and abused as the initial point of compromise. Recent security research findings indicate the rise in malware targeting the Kubernetes platform which showcases the need for secure configuration.
When you start scanning your container images, it can be disconcerting to discover that you have large numbers of vulnerabilities. Below is a scan I did last week on a vulnerable node image that I built. While a fairly extreme example, you can see that this image out of the box is showing as having over 800 vulnerabilities in it.
Container orchestration platform Kubernetes announced in December 2020 that its third and final release, Kubernetes v1.20, would deprecate dockershim and subsequently Docker as a container runtime. This deprecation has brought multiple changes that admins must be aware of and accordingly respond to.
Microsoft has discovered a new large-scale attack targeting Kubeflow instances to deploy malicious TensorFlow pods, using them to mine Monero cryptocurrency in Kubernetes cluster environments. Kubeflow is a popular open-source framework often used for running machine learning tasks in Kubernetes. TensorFlow, on the other hand, is an open-source machine learning platform used for implementing machine learning in a Kubernetes environment.
As anyone who has built or introduced a new project or product knows, success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and patience. When we first started the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project in 2016, we didn’t just spend all of our time on code — a lot of it was spent building awareness around the project and the community. As OPA started gaining traction, we were encouraged every time we’d hear a developer talk about OPA at a conference or mention it in a blog post.
Capital One Financial Corporation is the nation’s largest direct bank. They have a well-earned reputation as a data and tech pioneer in the financial services industry and have long been progressive in setting a bold agenda around digital and tech transformation. This has meant operating years ahead of most enterprises in moving to the cloud, scaling in-house engineering workforce and adopting agile, microservices, open source and a modern data ecosystem.
