Recently, Amazon AWS introduced the new feature EC2 Serial Console for instances using Nitro System. It provides a simple and secure way to perform troubleshooting by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance. Even though this feature is useful in case of break glass situations, from a security perspective, it could be used by adversaries to gain access through an unguarded secondary entrance.

The CVE-2021-20291 medium-level vulnerability has been found in containers/storage Go library, leading to Denial of Service (DoS) when vulnerable container engines pull an injected image from a registry. The container engines affected are: Any containerized infrastructure that relies on these vulnerable container engines are affected as well, including Kubernetes and OpenShift.

Detecting malicious processes is already complicated in cloud-native environments, as without the proper tools they are black boxes. It becomes even more complicated if those malicious processes are hidden. A malware using open source tools to evade detection has been reported. The open source project used by the malware is libprocesshider, a tool created by Sysdig’s former chief architect Gianluca.

GCP audit logs are a powerful tool that track everything happening in your cloud infrastructure. By analyzing them, you can detect and react to threats. Modern cloud applications are not just virtual machines, containers, binaries, and data. When you migrated to the cloud, you accelerated the development of your apps and increased operational efficiency. But you also started using new assets in the cloud that need securing.

Lateral movement is a growing concern with cloud security. That is, once a piece of your cloud infrastructure is compromised, how far can an attacker reach? What often happens in famous attacks to Cloud environments is a vulnerable application that is publicly available can serve as an entry point. From there, attackers can try to move inside the cloud environment, trying to exfiltrate sensitive data or use the account for their own purpose, like crypto mining.

Implementing the AWS Foundations CIS Benchmarks will help you improve your cloud security posture in your AWS infrastructure. What entry points can attackers use to compromise your cloud infrastructure? Do all your users have multi-factor authentication setup? Are they using it? Are you providing more permissions that needed? Those are some questions this benchmark will help you answer. Keep reading for an overview on AWS CIS Benchmarks and tips to implement it.

Implementing effective threat detection for AWS requires visibility into all of your cloud services and containers. An application is composed of a number of elements: hosts, virtual machines, containers, clusters, stored information, and input/output data streams. When you add configuration and user management to the mix, it’s clear that there is a lot to secure!