You might think that your metrics are harmless from a security point of view. Well, that’s not true, and in this talk at KubeCon Valencia 2022, we share the risk of exposed Prometheus server and how attackers use this information to successfully access a Kubernetes cluster. The slides are available here, and we also collected some mentions in social media and blogs and the feedback was very positive: It was our first time as speakers at KubeCon and expectations were really high.

Amazon EKS Anywhere (EKS-A) on Bare Metal is a new deployment option for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service that launched this week. Why bare metal? In the age of the cloud it would seem to go against “best practices.” On the contrary. While we tend to overuse the term, “hybrid cloud,” it is a real thing. Enterprises come in all shapes and sizes — and so do their compute choices and privacy requirements.

At Sysdig, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the security posture of the organizations that we work with. One of the areas we continuously improve upon is our platform’s threat intelligence and detection capabilities that leverage the open-source Falco project. We incorporate threat intelligence sourced from our own strategically placed honeypots, data collection systems, and multiple other open-source feeds.

Containers revolutionized how we build, deploy, and run applications with increased speed, agility, and scalability. But, as often happens with transformative technologies, they require an evolution to security strategy. Centralized deployments inside a protected perimeter gave way to continuous and distributed deployment of containers, creating a growing, dynamic, and distributed attack surface. IT and security teams were left blind and exposed in the cloud.

Either through human error or intentionally, configuration changes in the cloud may suddenly increase your attack surface. AWS Route 53 is an example of a service that needs to be continuously tracked for risky changes. As the first line of defense of our cloud, it is necessary to secure Amazon Route 53 and monitor risky configuration changes to avoid unwanted surprises. As you probably know, AWS Route 53 is of course a very popular DNS service offered by AWS, with millions of top-level domains.

Attackers use container escape techniques when they manage to control a container so the impact they can cause is much greater. This’s why it is a recurring topic in infosec and why it is so important to have tools like Falco to detect it. Container technologies rely on various features such as namespaces, cgroups, SecComp filters, and capabilities to isolate services running on the same host and apply the least privileges principle.

Every compliance audit will ask you to secure SSH, and every time a scanner checks the configuration or CSPM of your cloud account you’ll be warned for it. For example, if you don’t secure SSH on EC2, you’ll certainly get a critical alert stating that one of your Security Groups has its SSH port (22) open to the world. When this happens, you may think: Have I been pwned?

BPF (not eBPF), typically viewed from a defender/sysadmin’s perspective, provides easy access to network packets and the ability to take actions via programs written based on custom filters BEFORE they ever reach a (local) firewall. This same power, according to the PWC report and pending conference talk, was leveraged by a threat actor named Red Menshen, where the attackers have used BPFDoor technique to gain stealthy remote access to compromised devices from at least 2018 to the present.