Tag Archive for: Multi Cloud

When Moving to the Cloud, Don’t Overlook Resources On-Premises

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Today’s cloud infrastructure is complex and constantly evolving. In the cloud, security controls are implemented by developers and DevOps teams while on-premises controls are implemented by the firewall/network operations teams. These can create significant knowledge gaps, leading to unknown attack points.

Most security spending these days is focused on the cloud and treated as a silo, but you can’t afford to ignore your on-prem resources and how the two entities work together.

Challenges with Protecting Cloud and On-Premises Resources

With resources moving to the cloud, most of the attention moves to cloud security and protecting the cloud perimeter and resources. Yet on-prem resources also have connections and exposure. However, you need a comprehensive security strategy that protects both cloud and on-premises resources.

Many organizations and vendors struggle with getting this comprehensive picture. For example, in many companies, in-house teams are responsible for managing on-prem resources while other teams or third-party providers monitor the security of cloud resources. At the same time, you have DevOps teams that are constantly evolving the cloud environment.

Different Languages

The products and tools being used in the cloud and on-premises domains are often disconnected and speak different languages as do the teams using them.

The problem is not people, however. It’s often the tools being used, like having a separate doorman on the front door (cloud) and back door (on-prem), and they both speak different languages and often have competing goals. While security teams are focused on mitigating exposure, DevOps teams are looking for a faster way to bring products to market. Competing goals can only aggravate language barriers.

Even highly skilled teams may not understand how other teams work. The technology is different, the configurations are different, and some nuances require expert interpretation and experience. Few team members will be conversant in both on-prem and cloud resources.

Greater Complexity

More than 90 percent of large organizations already employ multi cloud strategies; 80 percent use hybrid clouds.

This creates an even greater complexity for security and management. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud use different names for instances and virtual machines. Azure calls them virtual machines (VMs), while Amazon has Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Google has the Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Even when the same term is used, it can mean different things. For example, a virtual private cloud (VPC) exists in both AWS and Google, but they are different and operate differently.

This only increases the language barrier that hinders a comprehensive approach to security.

Lack of Understanding of Shared Responsibility

Organizations also assume their cloud service provider (CSP) will protect assets in the cloud. While CSPs such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and others provide robust security for their networks, it’s still the customer’s responsibility to protect their data.

Gartner estimates that 99 percent of cloud security failures are the fault of the customer, not the CSP. The sheer volume of configuration settings and pathways to critical resources makes it difficult to manage security in the cloud. When you add in on-premises data centers or servers that are connected, the infrastructure becomes even more complex.

Constant monitoring and continuous compliance should be a shared responsibility between providers and organizations.

Not Monitoring Resource Misconfigurations

Most vendor security solutions are only as effective as how they’re configured. Yet few are monitoring that and telling you where these configurations are causing potential problems.

You need a comprehensive, end-to-end understanding of your cloud and on-prem infrastructure to analyze every configuration and security policy. While you may have cloud security tools for each environment, you need complete cloud network visibility to protect your infrastructure, look for exposure, and find security gaps.

Are You Seeing the Whole Picture?

Nearly every organization has at least some on-premises that are connected. The challenge often comes when it’s time to configure the right access for communication. You need to ensure that nobody on the cloud side can attack on-prem resources or vice versa. That’s why total visibility is essential.

If you’re not seeing the whole picture, it’s easy to miss attack points. Securing your infrastructure requires you to detail what you have, how it’s connected, and what’s at risk.

You need to:

  • Know what you have in your total infrastructure
  • Understand how everything is connected
  • Determine where your exposure is — all attack paths to cloud and on-premises
  • Uncover what policies or configurations created the exposure

Only then can you remediate problems and plug security gaps. You must understand how your cloud and on-prem resources are all interconnected to determine and mitigate your total risk.

Managing Cloud and On-Prem Resources

Some organizations turn to Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) as a way to provide visibility amid the complexities and the constant evolution of hybrid resources. Yet all existing CNAPP solutions don’t understand on-Premises and are insufficient to identify access via all attack path and associated risk. Most tools call into the application programming interfaces of cloud service providers, looking for misconfigurations at the compute and container levels. However, they don’t fully understand end-to-end access.

CNAPP is an important weapon in the battle to secure the cloud, but most vendor solutions simply do not provide the total visibility you need across cloud and on-prem resources. RedSeal solves these problems.

RedSeal on-premises and RedSeal Stratus in the cloud provide a complete view of the entire infrastructure. They identify the gaps in your security by pinpointing attack points and any hidden pathways. This analysis also determines the underlying reason why these attack points exist and what needs to happen to remediate them.

RedSeal solutions also work across borders. They provide the platform to speak to DevOps and firewall/network operations teams in the right way, helping eliminate language barriers. This way, you get benefits across borders for cloud and on-prem, enabling you to identify security issues across the entire infrastructure by driving collaborations between the teams and building trust.

Protect Your Entire Infrastructure

On-premise and cloud resources cannot be protected in a silo. Working in tandem with a shared responsibility model, a hybrid solution with RedSeal provides continuous monitoring and compliance across both on-prem and cloud resources, identifies gaps, and helps you protect your entire infrastructure.

Cyber Insurance Isn’t Enough Anymore

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The cyber insurance world has changed dramatically.

Premiums have risen significantly, and insurers are placing more limits on covered items. Industries like healthcare, retail, and government, where exposure is high, have been hit hard. Many organizations have seen huge rate increases for substantially less coverage than in the past. Others have seen their policies canceled or been unable to renew.

In many cases, insurers are offering half the coverage amounts at a higher cost. For example, some insurers that had previously issued $5 million liability policies have now reduced amounts to $1 million to $3 million while raising rates. Even with reduced coverage, some policy rates have risen by as much as 300%.

At the same time, insurers are leaving the field. Big payoffs in small risk pools can devastate profitability for insurers. Many insurers are reaching the break-even point where a single covered loss can wipe out years of profits. In fact, several major insurance companies have stopped issuing new cybersecurity insurance policies altogether.

This is in part to incidents like the recent Merck legal victory forcing a $1.4B payout due to the NotPetya’s malware attack. According to Fitch Ratings, more than 8,100 cyber insurance claims were paid out in 2021, the third straight year that claims increased by at least 100%. Payments from claims jumped 200% annually in 2019, 2020, and 2021 as well.

Claims are also being denied at higher rates. With such large amounts at stake, insurers are looking more closely at an organization’s policies and requiring proof that the organization is taking the right steps to protect itself. Companies need to be thinking about better ways to manage more of the cyber risks themselves. Cyber insurance isn’t enough anymore.

Dealing with Ransomware

At the heart of all of this drama is ransomware. The State of Ransomware 2022 report from Sophos includes some sobering statistics.

Ransomware attacks nearly doubled in 2021 vs. 2020, and ransom payments are higher as cybercriminals are demanding more money. In 2020, only 4% of organizations paid more than $1 million in ransoms. In 2021, that number jumped to 11%. The average ransomware paid by organizations in significant ransomware attacks grew by 500% last year to $812,360.

More companies are paying the ransom as well. Nearly half (46%) of companies hit by ransomware chose to pay despite FBI warnings not to do so. The FBI says paying ransoms encourages threat actors to target even more victims.

Even with cyber insurance, it can take months to fully recover from a ransomware attack and cause significant damage to a company’s reputation. Eighty-six percent (86%) of companies in the Sophos study said they lost business and revenue because of an attack. While 98% of cyber insurance claims were paid out, only four out of ten companies saw all of their costs paid.

There’s some evidence that cybercriminals are actively targeting organizations that have cyber insurance specifically because companies are more likely to pay. This has led to higher ransom demands, contributing to the cyber insurance crisis. At the same time, there’s been a significant increase in how cybercriminals are exacting payments.

Ransomware attackers are now often requiring two payments. The first is for providing the decryption key to unlock encrypted data. A demand for a separate payment is made to avoid releasing the data itself publicly. Threat actors are also hitting the same organizations more than once. When they know they’ll get paid, they often increase efforts to attack a company a second or third time until they lock down their security.

Protecting Yourself from Ransomware Attacks

Organizations must deploy strict guidelines and protocols for security and follow them to protect themselves. Even one small slip-up in following procedures can result in millions or even billions of dollars in losses and denied claims.

People, Processes, Tech, and Monitoring

The root cause of most breaches and ransomware attacks is a breakdown in processes, allowing an attack vector to be exploited. This breakdown often occurs because there is a lack of controls or adherence to these controls by the people using the network.

Whether organizations decide to pay the price for cyber insurance or not, they need to take proactive steps to ensure they have the right policies in place, have robust processes for managing control, and train their team members on how to protect organizational assets.

Organizations also need a skilled cybersecurity workforce to deploy and maintain protection along with the right tech tools.

Even with all of this in place, strong cybersecurity demands continuous monitoring and testing. Networks are rarely stable. New devices and endpoints are added constantly. New software, cloud services, and third-party solutions are deployed. With such fluidity, it’s important to continually identify potential security gaps and take proactive measures to harden your systems.

Identifying Potential Vulnerabilities

One of the first steps is understanding your entire network environment and potential vulnerabilities. For example, RedSeal’s cloud cybersecurity solution can create a real-time visualization of your network and continuously monitor your production environment and traffic. This provides a clear understanding of how data flows through your network to create a cyber risk model.

Users get a Digital Resilience Score which can be used to demonstrate their network’s security posture to cyber insurance providers.

This also helps organizations identify risk factors and compromised devices. Also, RedSeal provides a way to trace access throughout an entire network showing where an attacker can go once inside a network. This helps identify places where better segmentation is required to prevent unauthorized lateral movement.

In case an attack occurs, RedSeal accelerates incident responses by providing a more complete road map for containment.

Cyber Insurance Is Not Enough to Protect Your Bottom Line

With escalating activity and larger demands, cyber insurance is only likely to get more expensive and harder to get. Companies will also have to offer more proof about their security practices to be successful in filing claims or risk having claims denied.

For more information about how we can help you protect your network and mitigate the risks of successful cyber-attacks, contact RedSeal today.

The Unique Security Solution RedSeal Brings to Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Network Environments

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One of the most significant benefits of implementing a multi-cloud strategy is the flexibility to use the right set of services to optimize opportunities and costs.

As public cloud service providers (CSPs) have evolved, they have started to excel in different areas. For example, programmers often prefer to use Azure because of its built-in development tools. However, they often want their apps to run in AWS to leverage the elastic cloud compute capability.

Adopting a multi-cloud strategy enables enterprises to benefit from this differentiation between providers and implement a “best of breed” model for the services that need to consume. They can also realize significant efficiencies, including cost-efficiency, by managing their cloud resources properly.

But multi-cloud solutions also bring their own challenges from administration to security. This can be especially challenging for organizations that don’t have deep experience and knowledge across all platforms and how they interconnect. It can sometimes seem like speaking a different language. For example, AWS has a term called VPC (virtual private cloud). Google Cloud Platform (GCP) uses that term, too but it means something different. In other cases, the reverse is true. The terminology is different but they do the same things.

Cloud provider solutions don’t always address the needs of hybrid multi-cloud deployments. Besides the terminology of AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle’s OCI, IBM’s cloud, and others have different user interfaces. In a multi-cloud environment or hybrid environment, it can be far more difficult to secure than a single cloud.

Because of these challenges the need for a platform-independent solution that can understand all of the languages of each platform is needed to translate how your multi-cloud solutions are configured, interconnected, and help mitigate the risks.

How RedSeal Manages Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud

At RedSeal, we provide the lingua franca (or bridge) for multi-cloud and on-premise networks. Security operations center (SOC) teams and DevOps get visibility into their entire network across vendors. RedSeal provides the roadmap for how the network looks and interconnects, so they can secure their entire IT infrastructure without having to be experts on every platform.

In most organizations using multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, however, network engineers and SOC teams are being asked to learn every cloud and on-prem resource and make sure they are all configured properly and secured. Many will deploy virtual cloud instances and use virtual firewalls, but as complexity rises, this becomes increasingly difficult to manage.

RedSeal is the only company that can monitor your connectivity across all of your platforms whether they are on-prem or in the cloud. This allows you to see network topology across all of your resources in one centralized platform.

Proactive Security

Proactive security is also complex. Most security offerings monitor in real-time to alert you when there’s an attack underway. That’s an important aspect of your security, but it also has a fundamental flaw. Once you recognize the problem, it’s already underway. It’s like calling 9-1-1 when you discover an emergency. Help is on the way, but the situation has already occurred.

Wouldn’t you like to know your security issues before an incident occurs?

RedSeal helps you identify potential security gaps in your network, so you can address them proactively. And, we can do it across your entire network.

Network Segmentation

Segmenting your network allows you to employ zero trust and application layer identity management to prevent lateral movement within your network. One of the most powerful things about RedSeal is that it provides the visibility you need to manage network segmentation.

It’s a simple concept, but it can also become incredibly complex — especially for larger companies.

If you’re a small business with 100 employees, segmentation may be easy. For example, you segment your CNC machine so employees don’t have admin rights to change configurations. In a mid-size or enterprise-level company, however, you can have an exponential number of connections and end-points. We’ve seen organizations with more than a million endpoints and connections that admins never even knew existed.

It’s only gotten more complex with distributed workforces, remote workers, hybrid work environments, and more third-party providers.

RedSeal can map it all and help you provide micro-segmentation for both east-west and north-south traffic.

Vulnerability Prioritization

Another area where RedSeal excels is by adding context to network vulnerability management. This allows you to perform true risk-based assessments and prioritization from your scanners. RedSeal calculates vulnerability risk scores that account for not only severity and asset value but also downstream risk based on the accessibility of vulnerable downstream assets.

In many cases, RedSeal uncovers downstream assets that organizations didn’t know were connected or vulnerable. These connections provided open threat surfaces, but never showed up in alert logs or only as low-to-medium risks. So, SOC teams already overwhelmed with managing critical and high-risk alerts may never get to these hidden connections. Yet, the potential damage from threat actors exploiting these connections could be even greater than what showed up as high risk.

RedSeal shows you the complete pictures and helps you prioritize vulnerabilities so you can focus on the highest risks in your unique environment.

Play at Your Best

In the late ’90s, world chess champion Garry Kasparov faced off against Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer, in a six-game exhibition. Kasparov won the first match. Deep Blue won the second and the next three ended in draws. When Deep Blue won the final match and secured the overall victory, Kasparov was asked to concede that the best chess player in the world is now a computer.

Kasparov responded by saying that people were asking the wrong question. The question isn’t about whether the computer is better, but rather how do you play the best game of chess? Kasparov believes he lost not because the computer was better, but because he failed to perform at his best and see all of the gaps in his play.

You can’t afford to make mistakes in your security and beat yourself. By understanding your entire network infrastructure and identifying security gaps, you can take proactive measures to perform at your best.

RedSeal is the best move for a secure environment.

Learn more about how we can help protect your multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Contact RedSeal today.

Zero Trust: Back to Basics

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The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity in 2021 requires agencies to move towards zero trust in a meaningful way as part of modernizing infrastructure. Yet, federal agencies typically find it challenging to implement zero trust. While fine in theory, the challenge often lies in the legacy systems and on-premises networks that exist with tendrils reaching into multiple locations, including many which are unknown.

Identity management and authentication tools are an important part of network security, but before you can truly implement zero trust, you need an understanding of your entire infrastructure. Zero trust isn’t just about identity. It’s also about connectivity.

Take a quick detour here. Let’s say you’re driving a tractor-trailer hauling an oversized load. You ask Google Maps to take you the fastest route and it plots it out for you. However, you find that one of the routes is a one-lane dirt road and you can’t fit your rig. So, you go back to your mapping software and find alternate routes. Depending on how much time you have, the number of alternative pathways to your final destination is endless.

Computer security needs to think this way, too. Even if you’ve blocked the path for threat actors in one connection, how else could they get to their destination? While you may think traffic only flows one way on your network, most organizations find there are multiple pathways they never knew (or even thought) about.

To put in efficient security controls, you need to go back to basics with zero trust. That starts with understanding every device, application, and connection on your infrastructure.

Zero Trust Embodies Fundamental Best-Practice Security Concepts

Zero trust returns to the basics of good cybersecurity by assuming there is no traditional network edge. Whether it’s local, in the cloud, or any combination of hybrid resources across your infrastructure, you need a security framework that requires everyone touching your resources to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated.

By providing a balance between security and usability, zero trust makes it more difficult for attackers to compromise your network and access data. While providing users with authorized access to get their work done, zero-trust frameworks prevent unauthorized access and lateral movement.

By properly segmenting your network and requiring authentication at each stage, you can limit the damage even if someone does get inside your network. However, this requires a firm understanding of every device and application that are part of your infrastructure as well as your users.

Putting Zero Trust to Work

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Risk Management Framework publication 800-207 provides the conceptual framework for zero trust that government agencies need to adopt.

The risk management framework has seven steps:

  1. Prepare: mapping and analyzing the network
  2. Categorize: assess risk at each stage and prioritize
  3. Select: determine appropriate controls
  4. Implement: deploy zero trust solutions
  5. Assess: ensure solutions and policies are operating as intended
  6. Authorize: certify systems and workflow are ready for operation
  7. Monitor: provide continuous monitoring of security posture

In NIST’s subsequent draft white paper on planning for a zero-trust architecture, it reinforces the crucial first step, which is mapping the attack surface and identifying the key parts that could be targeted by a threat actor.

Instituting zero trust security requires detailed analysis and information gathering on devices, applications, connectivity, and users. Only when you understand how data moves through your network and all the different ways it can move through your network can you implement segmentation and zero trust.

Analysts should identify options to streamline processes, consolidate tools and applications, and sunset any vulnerable devices or access points. This includes defunct user accounts and any non-compliant resources.

Use Advanced Technology to Help You Perform Network Analysis

Trying to map your network manually is nearly impossible. No matter how many people you task to help and how long you have, things will get missed. Every device, appliance, configuration, and connection has to be analyzed. Third parties and connections to outside sources need to be evaluated. At the same time you’re conducting this inventory, things are in a constant state of change which makes it even easier to miss key components.

Yet, this inventory is the foundation for implementing zero trust. If you miss something, you leave security gaps within your infrastructure.

The right network mapping software for government agencies can automate this process by going out and gathering the information for you. Net mapping analysis can calculate every possible pathway through the network, taking into account NATS messaging and load balancing. During this stage, most organizations uncover a surprising number of previously unknown pathways. Each connection point needs to be assessed for need and whether it can be closed to reduce attack surfaces.

Automated network mapping will also provide an inventory of all the gear on your network and IP space in addition to your cloud and software-defined network (SDN) assets. Zero trust requires you to identify who and what can access your network, and who should have that access.

Once you have conducted this exhaustive inventory, you can then begin to implement the zero-trust policies with confidence.

Since your network is in a constant state of evolution with new users, devices, applications, and connectivity being added, changed, or revised, you also need continuous monitoring of your network infrastructure to ensure changes remain compliant with your security policies.

Back to the Basics

The conversation about zero trust often focuses narrowly on identity. Equally important are device inventory and connectivity. The underlying goal of zero trust is allowing only specific authorized individuals to access specific things on specific devices. Before you can put in place adequate security controls, you need to know about all of the devices and all the connections.

RedSeal provides network mapping, inventory, and mission-critical security and compliance services for government agencies and businesses and is Common Criteria certified. To learn more about implementing a zero-trust framework, you need to better understand the challenges and strategies for successful zero-trust implementation.

Download our Zero Trust Guide today to get started.

Future-Proofing Your Security Infrastructure

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Cybersecurity is getting more complicated every day. Why is this happening? Organizations are seeing their infrastructure becoming more complex, attack surfaces growing dramatically, and threats from cybercriminals evolving. What’s more, the reliance on public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments — coupled with more remote workers — has expanded the security perimeter for many organizations.

Even before COVID burst onto the scene, cybercrime was on the rise. Instead of a lone hacker sitting in a dark basement, contemporary cyber threat actors are part of organized crime rings.

All these trends underscore the importance of future-proofing your security infrastructure to combat major security threats and protect your mission-critical data.

Cyberattacks Are on the Rise: Data Tells the Tale

From Solar Winds to the Colonial Pipeline attack, cybercriminals have been making headlines in recent years. In addition, statistics reveal that cyberattacks are an ever-growing problem:

Attacks are more prevalent, and they are getting more expensive. The average cost of a data breach now exceeds $4.2 million per incident and can cause recurring problems for years. On average, more than $2.9 million is lost to cybercrime every minute.

Despite increased spending on cybersecurity and best efforts by chief information security officers (CISOs) and information technology (IT) teams, nearly 80% of senior IT leaders believe their organizations lack sufficient protection against cyber-attacks. With the rising threat, every organization needs a strategy to future-proof its infrastructure.

What is Future-Proofing?

Future-proofing your cyber security creates a robust foundation that can evolve as your organization grows and new cyber threats emerge. This includes continually assessing your infrastructure for security gaps, proactively identifying threats, and remediating potential weaknesses.

Future-proof planning encompasses the totality of your security efforts. Failure to plan puts your entire organization at risk. You simply cannot afford to be left unprotected against current and future threats.

What Can (and Can’t) Be Future-Proofed within Your Technology Infrastructure?

What makes future-proofing technology challenging is that we don’t know exactly what the IT landscape will look like in the future. A few years ago, who knew we would see the explosion in the number of remote employees  — often working on unprotected home networks.

The good news is that the cloud has given us tremendous flexibility and helps us future-proof without overspending right now on capacity we may or may not need. With nearly infinite scalability, cloud applications have allowed organizations to adapt and grow as necessary. However, it’s also put more sensitive and proprietary data online than ever before and made IT infrastructure more complex.

To future-proof your infrastructure, you need an approach for visualizing, monitoring, and managing security risks across every platform and connection. This lets you expand your security perimeter as your network grows and proactively identify new exposure as you evolve.

How Can Organizations Prepare for the Future?

Security needs to be part of every company’s DNA. Before you make any business decisions, you should run through security filters to ensure the right safeguards are in place. It takes a security culture that goes beyond the IT departments to future-proof your organization.

With data in the cloud, there’s a shared security responsibility. For example, public cloud providers take responsibility for their cloud security, but they are not responsible for your apps, servers, or data security. Too many companies are still relying on cloud providers to protect assets and abdicating their part of the shared security model.

Between multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environments, and a mix of cloud and on-prem applications, it’s become increasingly difficult to track and manage security across every platform. Many security tools only work in one of these environments, so piecing together solutions is also challenging.

For example, do you know the answers to these questions:

  • What resources do we have across all our public cloud and on-premises environments?
  • Are any of these resources unintentionally exposed to the internet?
  • What access is possible within and between cloud and on-premises environments?
  • Do our cloud deployments meet security best practices?
  • How do we validate our cloud network segmentation policies?
  • Are we remediating the riskiest vulnerabilities in the cloud first?

An in-depth visualization of the topology and hierarchy of your infrastructure can uncover vulnerabilities, identify exposure, and provide targeted remediation strategies.

You also need a cloud security solution to identify every resource connected to the internet. Whether you’re using AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, or other public cloud resources along with private cloud and on-prem resources, you need a holistic view of security.

Traditional security information and event management (SEIM) systems often produce a large volume of data, making it unwieldy to identify and isolate the highest priority concerns. You need a network model across all resources to accelerate network incident response and quickly locate any compromised device on the network.

Another necessity is continuous penetration tests to measure your state of readiness and re-evaluate your security posture. This helps future-proof your security as you add resources and new threats emerge.

Create a Secure Future for Your Organization

Creating a secure future for your organization is essential. As IT infrastructure and connectivity become more complex, attack surfaces continue to grow, and cybercriminals evolve their tactics, the risks are too great for your company, customers, and career not to build a secure foundation. You need to do more than plan your response to an incident and must know how to prevent cyberattacks with proactive security measures.

Secure all your network environments — public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises — in one comprehensive, dynamic visualization. That’s Red Seal.

RedSeal — through its cloud security solution and professional services — helps government agencies and Global 2000 companies measurably reduce their cyber risk by showing them what’s in all their network environments and where resources are exposed to the internet. RedSeal verifies that networks align with security best practices, validates network segmentation policies, and continuously monitors compliance with policies and regulations.

Contact Red Seal today to take a test drive.

Five Steps to Improve your Multi-Cloud Security

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In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on how and where we do business. For many enterprises, the “where” became the cloud – immediately. This rapid adoption of the cloud – in most cases multiple clouds – created a rapid increase in security issues. Suddenly, enterprises had new cloud security requirements they needed to understand and deploy without the benefit of time to learn. The complexity continued to increase, and this triggered new security issues with potentially costly consequences. These included:

  • Data leakage/exfiltration – Unauthorized movement of sensitive data from inside the enterprise to outside can be accidental or deliberate. Often the discovery that data has been leaked occurs days, weeks, or months later, and can result in a damaged brand, lost customer trust, and fines.
  • Ransomware – Enterprises can pay thousands to millions of dollars to access encrypted data and systems in order to restore operations. Additionally they can be extorted to pay for the recovery of stolen sensitive information.  If they refuse to pay,  enterprises can lose days or weeks of revenue trying to recover their systems, and risk having sensitive data posted on the internet.
  • Non-compliance – Enterprises not adhering to mandatory regulations (PCI-DSS, CMMC, HIPAA) or voluntary cybersecurity frameworks (NIST, GDPR) can incur costly penalties and potential shutdowns that limit their ability to conduct business. Customer relationships may be damaged by the perception that security isn’t a priority.
  • Team collaboration/staffing shortages – DevOps is highly distributed across the enterprise and many teams acknowledge the lack of cloud platform security expertise. Cloud security practices should encourage significant collaboration that leverages both internal and external expertise.

To maintain cloud security and reduce–if not totally eliminate–the impact of these serious security issues, enterprises need a proven cybersecurity framework to address these issue directly.

Steps to strengthen your cloud security

Cloud environments are dynamic and constantly evolving. These 5 steps provide a proven framework to improve your enterprise’s cloud security using a technology driven approach, even in a multi-cloud environment.

  1. Visualize/maintain an accurate inventory of compute, storage and network functions
    Security teams often lack visibility across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Cloud environments are often managed in disparate consoles in tabular forms. Security teams need to understand controls that filter traffic, including cloud native controls (network security groups and NACLs), and third-party infrastructure (SASE, SD-WAN and third-party firewalls). A single solution that provides a detailed visual representation of the multi-cloud environment is critical.
  2. Continuously monitor for exposed resources
    It is important to understand which cloud resources are publicly accessible or Internet-facing. Unintentional exposure of resources to the Internet is a major cause of cloud breaches. This includes any data resources like AWS S3 buckets or AWS EC2 instances. Security teams need to easily identify and report on exposed resources, and then provide remediation options that include changes to security groups or firewall policy.
  3. Continuously validate against industry best practices
    There are many industry best practice frameworks that can be used to validate cloud security. CIS Benchmarks and Cloud Security Alliance are two of these frameworks. Security teams should continuously validate adherence to best practices and quickly remediate findings to eliminate misconfigurations and avoid excessive permissions.
  4. Validate policies – segmentation within/across clouds and corporate mandates
    Many security teams create segmentation policies to minimize attack service and reduce the risk of lateral movement. Examples may be segmenting one Cloud Service Provider from another (AWS cannot talk to Azure) or segmenting access across accounts in the same CSP. Both segmentation and corporate policies should be continuously monitored for violations and provide detailed information that enables rapid remediation.
  5. Conduct comprehensive vulnerability prioritization
    All vulnerability management solutions provide a severity score, but more comprehensive prioritization can occur by identifying which vulnerabilities in the cloud are Internet-facing (including the downstream impact of these vulnerabilities).

Implementing success

While the risks grew for many enterprises this past year as they rapidly moved to the cloud, several have dodged the bullet. RedSeal has helped many successfully adopt a strong security framework and gained actionable insights into their cloud environments. These insights were often an eye-opener.

  • Underestimated VPC[1] inventory in the cloud – A healthcare customer expected “a few VPCs” in their cloud environment. The implementation of RedSeal revealed they had over 200 VPCs. This helped them see their overall cloud footprint and reduced their attack surface.
  • Exposed cloud resources– An enterprise customer incorrectly believed that all of their cloud resources were protected by a third-party firewall. Consequently, many resources were directly exposed to the Internet. RedSeal identified the exposed resources and the misconfigurations before any exploitation occurred.
  • Risky shadow IT – A technology company’s business unit had cloud instances that did not pass the company’s access security mandate. RedSeal identified these resources and helped determine that employees had bypassed process and created unauthorized cloud resources. The company’s shadow IT with respect to cloud security is now under control.
  • Zone-based segmentation as required by PCI-DSS – A payment card provider validated that card holder data was segregated and protected after their cloud migration. They modeled and monitored their segmentation policy, enabling their audit to be completed quickly and confidently.
  • VPC/VNET without subnets or subnets without instances – A healthcare customer discovered 100s of empty VPC/VNET subnets and subnets without instances in their cloud environment. The default configuration: “ANY/ANY” could have been easily exploited by malicious actors and industry best practices indicate they should be deleted or actively monitored.

 

With RedSeal, all these enterprises, and more, have utilized a multi-cloud security methodology that highlights: Visualization/Inventory, Exposure, Industry Best Practices, Policy Validation, and Vulnerability Prioritization. These 5 steps can bring peace of mind to security teams who have had to act quickly and without warning in response to this most unprecedented year.

Learn More

Looking for more details on how 3rd party firewalls may impact your cloud security framework? Download our whitepaper “How Should I Secure My Cloud?”

RedSeal’s Cloud Security Solution -Ensure Your Critical Cloud Resources Aren’t Exposed to the Internet

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[1] AWS uses the term VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and Azure uses the term VNet (Virtual Network). Conceptually, they provide the bedrock for provisioning resources and services in the cloud. However, there is variability in implementation.

AI, cyber terrain analytics improve hybrid multicloud security

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VenturebBeat | May 21, 2021

Typical hybrid cloud IT integration strategies have fundamental design flaws that CIOs and CISOs need to address if they’re going to avert another attack on the scale of SolarWinds.

…any network mapping platform needs to excel at visualization and provide insightful analysis at a graphical level to identify potential security anomalies and actual breach activity. Useful in understanding this is the following example of how RedSeal’s cyber risk modeling software for hybrid cloud environments works.

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