When it’s ensuring that tens of thousands of visitors have the best experience possible every single day. Keeping people entertained is a 24/7 endeavor, even the smallest hiccup results in a social media firestorm. Keeping things running requires thousands of dedicated employees and a staggeringly complex network that sprawls the area of a major city and is comprised of millions of endpoints - each of which plays a critical role in ensuring everyone is safe and has a great time.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) is an AWS service that enables you to launch AWS resources within your own virtual network. Because you can deploy VPCs in separate regions and other VPC components themselves are deployable across different Availability Zones, VPC-hosted environments tend to be highly available and more secure.
In part 1 of this series, we looked at the common components of an Amazon VPC including CIDR blocks, subnets, firewalls, and route tables. We also looked at approaches for how to configure those components securely.
A VPN, or a virtual private network, is a service that protects your internet connection. It encrypts your data, protects your online identity by masking your IP address and allows you to use public WiFi hotspots safely. VPNs create a private, encrypted network within the public network providing an extra, and known, layer of security and privacy.
My first interaction with a firewall was with a TIS Gauntlet that I compiled on a Sun workstation in 1994. Since then, I have worked with firewalls from Checkpoint (back when configuration files were clear text flat files and they only had support out of their headquarters in Israel), Raptor, Pix (when they booted from a 3 ¼” floppy), and finally the Cisco ASAs, FortiGates, and Palo Alto firewalls of today.
In our companion blog post, Vedere Labs analyzed the main ransomware trends we observed in the first half of 2022, including state-sponsored ransomware, new mainstream targets and evolving extortion techniques. Ransomware is the main threat targeting most organizations nowadays. However, three other notable cyberthreat trends also evolved during this period: Below we analyze each of these trends in more detail.