Tag Archive for: CSPM

RedSeal and Cloud Security Posture Management

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According to Gartner’s Innovation Insight for Cloud Security Posture Management, this year (2021), “50% of enterprises will unknowingly and mistakenly have exposed some applications, network segments, storage, or APIs directly to the public internet”. And by 2023, “…at least 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.”

What do these statistics say about the changing face of cybersecurity? Twenty years ago, the most common source of security failures was naïve user behavior, typically clicking on a malicious email attachment or link. In on-premise environments, this is still a common vector of infection, but in the cloud the problem is not naïve users, it is overwhelmed administrators. 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault, because cloud platforms and applications will simply be misconfigured. Let that sink in. Simple misconfigurations were never the primary source of security failures in the past.

Administrators aren’t stupid; they misconfigure systems because they are overwhelmed. Of course, there is a chronic shortage of security talent, but that has been true for decades. What has changed, with the advent of cloud computing, is the overwhelming complexity of the systems. Cloud security controls and best practices are very different from those used in on-premise environments. Those available in AWS are similar, but different from those in Azure, or Google Cloud. Kubernetes has a unique security model of its own, and all these environments are changing constantly.

To deal with this complexity and constant change, a new family of technology has emerged broadly referred to as Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). The goal of these technologies is to help admins understand what resources they have in their cloud environments, what security controls are in place, how it is all really configured, and whether it meets various compliance standards.

For more than a decade, RedSeal has been in the business of helping customers understand their on-premise networks i.e. what devices are on the network, how they are connected, and the security implications of their configuration. We do this by creating a detailed model of their network that can be compared against best practices, compliance standards, and the customer’s intended network design (customers are almost always surprised with how different their network is from what they originally intended). Put simply, customers use us to find and correct network misconfigurations.

With data centers and networks moving to the cloud, our customers are increasingly asking us to help them find and correct cloud misconfigurations as well. They need an accurate model of their cloud environments to understand questions like how many cloud accounts they really have, what resources are in each, what security controls are in place, what is the aggregate effect of all those security controls on resource access, and are any resources inadvertently exposed to the internet. They often have a basic design for their cloud but are unsure if their implementation is consistent with their intentions. The truth is, it never is, and they need a product that can provide them with a reality check.

At RedSeal, our mission is to provide organizations with technology that allows them to understand their network, hybrid, and cloud security posture. Because cloud technology is so complex, and changing so quickly, organizations need powerful technology to understand their implementation. They need to model their environment, so they can easily spot flaws. Our tag line is “See and Secure” because you can’t secure what you don’t understand.

For more information on RedSeal Stratus, our new CSPM solution, click here.

For more information of ways that RedSeal can help avoid unintended internet exposure, check out our Solution Brief.

If you’re concerned about your EKS Security, click here.

RedSeal Launches New Cloud Security Posture Management Solution to Empower Security Teams

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RedSeal Stratus identifies unintended exposure to the Internet, creates a connectivity visualization of your cloud architecture, and helps you understand your Kubernetes Inventory

Building on more than a decade of award-winning cybersecurity analytics we are excited to launch RedSeal Stratus, our new Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution that stops unintended exposure of cloud resources to the Internet.

Cloud misconfigurations, which can leave resources unintentionally exposed to untrusted networks, are the major source of data breaches. To help security teams better manage the increased risk associated with increasing cloud complexity, RedSeal Stratus provides security teams with an out-of-the-box overview of Internet-exposed resources by tags, connectivity visualization between and within their Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud resources, and inventory of AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) resources.

While native Cloud Security Provider tools provide basic capabilities that may be sufficient for smaller cloud-first organizations, larger organizations who are probably hybrid, multi-cloud, and need advanced features should choose a third-party CSPM solution.

Current CSPM solutions simply call CSP APIs to determine if subnets are Internet-facing. For more accurate results, RedSeal Stratus identifies resources exposed to the Internet by calculating access through security control points from end-to-end.

Only RedSeal Stratus can calculate how an instance gets to the Internet, what security points it goes through, and through which ports and protocols. Other security products may show connectivity where there is traffic, using an agent-based approach, but only RedSeal Stratus can show you all connectivity possible including that without traffic–and without an agent. As a result, RedSeal Stratus is unique among native CSP and CSPM offerings by:

  • Immediately identifying exposure to the Internet, with an out-of-the-box dashboard of all resources exposed to the Internet, pre-calculated and grouped by tags
  • Providing complete and up-to-date visualization of your AWS infrastructure, including all accounts, VPCs, gateways and instances
  • Showing details of your Amazon Kubernetes (EKS) inventory to quickly identify services exposed outside your clusters, and to discover overly permissive user and service accounts

RedSeal Stratus is a cloud security solution for the modern day that provides security teams with a unified, interactive view of their AWS environments, including Kubernetes (EKS) inventory, and exposed resources that can lead to costly data breaches.

To learn more, visit www.redseal.net/stratus or Request A Demo.

Cloud Security Posture Management and RedSeal

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Pilots know that to fly safely means keeping track of the weather. They track storm fronts because that is where the turbulence is. Pilots lose their wings if they fly blindly into the air.

Gaps in your security posture are where the cyber storm fronts are. The cyber storm is both on-prem and in the cloud. To do your job correctly, you need to get an accurate forecast today of the cyber weather.

The rush to move assets into the cloud has created all sorts of new stormy weather to contend with.

Pilots and Weather

A nationally recognized financial institution, a large well-resourced company, did not check the security gaps and was caught off guard when Paige Thompson, former AWS software engineer, exploited a misconfigured web application firewall to access one of their servers. That server contained 140,000 Social Security numbers, 1 million Canadian Social Insurance numbers, 80,000 bank account numbers, and an undisclosed number of customers’ personal information. Thompson then attempted to share access to the information with others online, per CNN.

Had the organization’s cyber team acted like safety-conscious pilots and checked the weather first, they would have noticed the misconfigurations before someone on the outside did.

So, what is the cyber equivalent of checking the weather?

Cloud Security Posture Management

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) automates the identification and remediation of risks across cloud infrastructures, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Without CSPM, developers can create any number of instances in the cloud, and deploy them, with little oversight.

According to Threatpost, the team at Imperva created an internal compute instance that was misconfigured and publicly accessible. Worse, it had an AWS API key that enabled attackers to access a database snapshot and exfiltrate customer information.

It was reported that security researchers found MongoDB database, run by a vendor, that was left unprotected on a cloud server and contained 2.8 million CenturyLink data records belonging to several hundred thousand of the tech company’s customers.

Why? Most companies have a lack of central control and value speed over security.

If large companies like these are messing up the necessary security configurations in their cloud services, then medium and small sized firms are unquestionably doing the same thing, given their lack of resources.

How is the RedSeal Approach to CSPM Different?

The thing is, most enterprise networks are hybrid, spanning both public and private cloud environments along with physical network infrastructure. While you may have security tools for each environment, you probably cannot see how your whole network is woven together.

RedSeal’s cloud security solution is the only product that brings complex hybrid multi-cloud networks into one unified model. You’ll be able to understand all your network environments in one dynamic visualization, where your high-value assets are, and all the ways they are vulnerable to attack.

RedSeal shows you all possible network access — across, within and between public cloud, private cloud and physical network environments — whether the access is intended or not.

RedSeal allows SMBs to compete and defend themselves and overcome their lack of experience. The responsibility for security is different on different platforms, and smaller companies automatically assume that it has been taken care of, when it’s not. Moreover, different providers use different terminology for the same services.

You are only milliseconds away from the bad guy.

Pilots are grounded when they fly willy-nilly into a dangerous storm, if they are lucky enough to still be alive. Gaps in your security posture are the cyber storms you have to contend with and plan for. These storms are both on-prem and in the cloud. Today’s accurate forecast of the cyber weather comes from RedSeal.

Happy flying!

For more information, visit our page Understand Your Hybrid Multi-Cloud Network.