Tag Archives: InsightCloudSec

Securing the Next Level: Automated Cloud Defense in Game Development with InsightCloudSec

Post Syndicated from Miklos Csecsi original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/03/07/securing-the-next-level-automated-cloud-defense-in-game-development-with-insightcloudsec/

Securing the Next Level: Automated Cloud Defense in Game Development with InsightCloudSec

Imagine the following scenario: You’re about to enjoy a strategic duel on chess.com or dive into an intense battle in Fortnite, but as you log in, you find your hard-earned achievements, ranks, and reputation have vanished into thin air. This is not just a hypothetical scenario but a real possibility in today’s cloud gaming landscape, where a single security breach can undo years of dedication and achievement.

Cloud gaming, powered by giants like AWS, is transforming the gaming industry, offering unparalleled accessibility and dynamic gaming experiences. Yet, with this technological leap forward comes an increase in cyber threats. The gaming world has already witnessed significant security breaches, such as the GTA5 code theft and Activision’s consistent data challenges, highlighting the lurking dangers in this digital arena.

In such a scenario, securing cloud-based games isn’t just an additional feature; it’s an absolute necessity. As we examine the intricate world of cloud gaming, the role of comprehensive security solutions becomes increasingly vital. In the subsequent sections, we will explore how Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec can be instrumental in securing cloud infrastructure and CI/CD processes in game development, thereby safeguarding the integrity and continuity of our virtual gaming experiences.

Challenges in Cloud-Based Game Development

Picture this: You’re a game developer, immersed in creating the next big title in cloud gaming. Your team is buzzing with creativity, coding, and testing. But then, out of the blue, you’re hit by a cyberattack, much like the one that rocked CD Projekt Red in 2021. Imagine the chaos – months of hard work (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3) locked up by ransomware, with all sorts of confidential data floating in the wrong hands. This scenario is far from fiction in today’s digital gaming landscape.

What Does This Kind of Attack Really Mean for a Game Development Team?

The Network Weak Spot: It’s like leaving the back door open while you focus on the front; hackers can sneak in through network gaps we never knew existed. That’s what might have happened with CD Projekt Red. A more fortified network could have been their digital moat.

When Data Gets Held Hostage: It’s one thing to secure your castle, but what about safeguarding the treasures inside? The CD Projekt Red incident showed us how vital it is to keep our game codes and internal documents under lock and key, digitally speaking.

A Safety Net Missing: Imagine if CD Projekt Red had a robust backup system. Even after the attack, they could have bounced back quicker, minimizing the damage. It’s like having a safety net when you’re walking a tightrope. You hope you won’t need it, but you’ll be glad it’s there if you do.

This is where a solution like Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec comes into play. It’s not just about building higher walls; it’s about smarter, more responsive defense systems. Think of it as having a digital watchdog that’s always on guard, sniffing out threats, and barking alarms at the first sign of trouble.

With tools that watch over your cloud infrastructure, monitor every digital move in real time, and keep your compliance game strong, you’re not just creating games; you’re also playing the ultimate game of digital security – and winning.

In the realm of cloud-based game development, mastering AWS services’ security nuances transcends mere technical skill – it’s akin to painting a masterpiece. Let’s embark on a journey through the essential AWS services like EC2, S3, Lambda, CloudFront, and RDS, with a keen focus on their security features – our guardians in the digital expanse.

Consider Amazon EC2 as the infrastructure’s backbone, hosting the very servers that breathe life into games. Here, Security Groups act as discerning gatekeepers, meticulously managing who gets in and out. They’re not just gatekeepers but wise ones, remembering allowed visitors and ensuring a seamless yet secure flow of traffic.

Amazon S3 stands as our digital vault, safeguarding data with precision-crafted bucket policies. These policies aren’t just rules; they’re declarations of trust, dictating who can glimpse or alter the stored treasures. History is littered with tales of those who faltered, so precision here is paramount.

Lambda functions emerge as the silent virtuosos of serverless architecture, empowering game backends with their scalable might. Yet, their power is wielded judiciously, guided by the principle of least privilege through meticulously assigned roles and permissions, minimizing the shadow of vulnerability.

Amazon CloudFront, our swift courier, ensures game content flies across the globe securely and at breakneck speed. Coupled with AWS Shield (Advanced), it stands as a bulwark against DDoS onslaughts, guaranteeing that game delivery remains both rapid and impregnable.

Amazon RDS, the fortress for player data, automates the mundane yet crucial tasks – backups, patches, scaling – freeing developers to craft experiences. It whispers secrets only to those meant to hear, guarding data with robust encryption, both at rest and in transit.

Visibility and vigilance form the bedrock of our security ethos. With tools like AWS CloudTrail and CloudWatch, our gaze extends across every corner of our domain, ever watchful for anomalies, ready to act with precision and alacrity.

Encryption serves as our silent sentinel, a protective veil over data, whether nestled in S3’s embrace or traversing the vastness to and from EC2 and RDS. It’s our unwavering shield against the curious and the malevolent alike.

In weaving the security measures of these AWS services into the fabric of game development, we engage not in mere procedure but in the creation of a secure tapestry that envelops every facet of the development journey. In the vibrant, ever-evolving landscape of game creation, fortifying our cloud infrastructure with a security-first mindset is not just a technical endeavor – it’s a strategic masterpiece, ensuring our games are not only a source of joy but bastions of privacy and security in the cloud.

Automated Cloud Security with InsightCloudSec

When it comes to deploying a game in the cloud, understanding and implementing automated security is paramount. This is where Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec takes center stage, revolutionizing how game developers secure their cloud environments with a focus on automation and real-time monitoring.

Data Harvesting Strategies

InsightCloudSec differentiates itself through its innovative approach to data collection and analysis, employing two primary methods: API harvesting and Event Driven Harvesting (EDH). Initially, InsightCloudSec utilizes the API method, where it directly calls cloud provider APIs to gather essential platform information. This process enables InsightCloudSec to populate its platform with critical data, which is then unified into a cohesive dataset. For example, disparate storage solutions from AWS, Azure, and GCP are consolidated under a generic “Storage” category, while compute instances are unified as “Instances.” This normalization allows for the creation of universal compliance packs that can be applied across multiple cloud environments, enhancing the platform’s efficiency and coverage.

However, the real game-changer is Rapid7’s implementation of EDH. Unlike the traditional API pull method, EDH leverages serverless functions within the customer’s cloud environment to ingest security event data and configuration changes in real-time. This data is then pushed to the InsightCloudSec platform, significantly reducing costs and increasing the speed of data acquisition. For AWS environments, this means event information can be updated in near real-time, within 60 seconds, and within 2-3 minutes for Azure and GCP. This rapid update capability is a stark contrast to the hourly or daily updates provided by other cloud security platforms, setting InsightCloudSec apart as a leader in real-time cloud security monitoring.

Automated Remediation with InsightCloudSec Bots

The integration of near-to-real-time event information through Event Driven Harvesting (EDH) with InsightCloudSec’s advanced bot automation features equips developers with a formidable toolset for safeguarding cloud environments. This unique combination not only flags vulnerable configurations but also facilitates automatic remediation within minutes, a critical capability for maintaining a pristine cloud ecosystem. InsightCloudSec’s bots go beyond mere detection; they proactively manage misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across virtual machines and containers, ensuring the cloud space is both secure and compliant.

The versatility of these bots is remarkable. Developers have the flexibility to define the scope of the bot’s actions, allowing changes to be applied across one or multiple accounts. This granular control ensures that automated security measures are aligned with the specific needs and architecture of the cloud environment.

Moreover, the timing of these interventions can be finely tuned. Whether responding to a set schedule or reacting to specific events – such as the creation, modification, or deletion of resources – the bots are adept at addressing security concerns at the most opportune moments. This responsiveness is especially beneficial in dynamic cloud environments where changes are frequent and the security landscape is constantly evolving.

The actions undertaken by InsightCloudSec’s bots are diverse and impactful. According to the extensive list of sample bots provided by Rapid7, these automated guardians can, for example:

  • Automatically tag resources lacking proper identification, ensuring that all elements within the cloud are categorized and easily manageable
  • Enforce compliance by identifying and rectifying resources that do not adhere to established security policies, such as unencrypted databases or improperly configured networks
  • Remediate exposed resources by adjusting security group settings to prevent unauthorized access, a crucial step in safeguarding sensitive data
  • Monitor and manage excessive permissions, scaling back unnecessary access rights to adhere to the principle of least privilege, thereby reducing the risk of internal and external threats
  • And much more…

This automation, powered by InsightCloudSec, transforms cloud security from a reactive task to a proactive, streamlined process.

By harnessing the power of EDH for real-time data harvesting and leveraging the sophisticated capabilities of bots for immediate action, developers can ensure that their cloud environments are not just reactively protected but are also preemptively fortified against potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. This shift towards automated, intelligent cloud security management empowers developers to focus on innovation and development, confident in the knowledge that their infrastructure is secure, compliant, and optimized for the challenges of modern cloud computing.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Enhanced: Introducing mimInsightCloudSec

In the dynamic arena of cloud security, particularly in the bustling sphere of game development, the wisdom of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” holds unprecedented significance. This is where the role of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) becomes pivotal, and Rapid7’s innovative tool, mimInsightCloudSec, elevates this approach to new heights.

mimInsightCloudSec, a cutting-edge component of the InsightCloudSec platform, is specifically designed to integrate seamlessly into any development pipeline, whether you prefer working with executable binaries or thrive in a containerized ecosystem. Its versatility allows it to be a perfect fit for various deployment strategies, making it an indispensable tool for developers aiming to embed security directly into their infrastructure deployment process.

The primary goal of mimInsightCloudSec is to identify vulnerabilities before the infrastructure is even created, thus embodying the proactive stance on security. This foresight is crucial in the realm of game development, where the stakes are high, and the digital landscape is constantly shifting. By catching vulnerabilities at this nascent stage, developers can ensure that their games are built on a foundation of security, devoid of the common pitfalls that could jeopardize their work in the future.

Securing the Next Level: Automated Cloud Defense in Game Development with InsightCloudSec
Figure 2: Shift Left – Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security

Upon completion of its analysis, mimInsightCloudSec presents its findings in a variety of formats suitable for any team’s needs, including HTML, SARIF, and XML. This flexibility ensures that the results are not just comprehensive but also accessible, allowing teams to swiftly understand and address any identified issues. Moreover, these results are pushed to the InsightCloudSec platform, where they contribute to a broader overview of the security posture, offering actionable insights into potential misconfigurations.

But the capabilities of the InsightCloudSec platform extend even further. Within this sophisticated environment, developers can craft custom configurations, tailoring the security checks to fit the unique requirements of their projects. This feature is particularly valuable for teams looking to go beyond standard security measures, aiming instead for a level of infrastructure hardening that is both rigorous and bespoke. These custom configurations empower developers to establish a static level of security that is robust, nuanced, and perfectly aligned with the specific needs of their game-development projects.

By leveraging mimInsightCloudSec within the InsightCloudSec ecosystem, game developers not only can anticipate and mitigate vulnerabilities before they manifest but also refine their cloud infrastructure with precision-tailored security measures. This proactive and customized approach ensures that the gaming experiences they craft are not only immersive and engaging but also built on a secure, resilient digital foundation.

Securing the Next Level: Automated Cloud Defense in Game Development with InsightCloudSec
Figure 3: Misconfigurations and recommended remediations in the InsightCloudSec platform

In summary, Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec offers a comprehensive and automated approach to cloud security, crucial for the dynamic environment of game development. By leveraging both API harvesting and innovative Event Driven Harvesting – along with robust support for Infrastructure as Code – InsightCloudSec ensures that game developers can focus on what they do best: creating engaging and immersive gaming experiences with the knowledge that their cloud infrastructure is secure, compliant, and optimized for performance.

In a forthcoming blog post, we’ll explore the unique security challenges that arise when operating a game in the cloud. We’ll also demonstrate how InsightCloudSec can offer automated solutions to effortlessly maintain a robust security posture.

Application Security Posture Management

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/01/16/application-security-posture-management/

Application Security Posture Management

Accelerating the Remediation of Vulnerabilities From Code To Cloud

Written by Eric Sheridan, Chief Innovation Officer, Tromzo

In this guest blog post by Eric Sheridan, Chief Innovation Officer at valued Rapid7 partner Tromzo, you’ll learn how Rapid7 customers can utilize ASPM solutions to accelerate triaging, prioritization and remediation of findings from security testing products such as InsightAppSec and InsightCloudSec.

Application Security’s Massive Data Problem

Application Security teams have a massive data problem. With the widespread adoption of cloud native architectures and increasing fragmentation of development technologies, many teams amass a wide variety of specialized security scanning tools. These technologies are highly specialized, designed to carry out comprehensive security testing as a means of identifying as many vulnerabilities as possible.

A natural byproduct of their deployment at scale is that, in aggregate, application security (appsec) teams are presented with thousands – if not millions – of vulnerabilities to process. If you’re going to deploy advanced application security testing solutions, then of course a significant amount of vulnerability data is going to be generated. In fact, I’d argue this is a good problem to have. It’s like the old saying goes: You cannot improve what you cannot measure.

Here’s the kicker though: given a backlog of, lets say 200k vulnerabilities with a severity of “critical” across the entire product stack, where do you start your remediation efforts and why? Put another way: is this critical more important than that critical? Answering this question requires additional context, of which is often manually obtained by appsec teams. And how do you then disseminate that siloed vulnerability and track its remediation workflow to resolution? And can you replicate that for the other 199,999 critical vulnerabilities? This is what I mean when I say appsec teams have a massive data problem. Accelerating remediation, reducing risk, and demonstrating ROI requires us to be able to act on the data we collect at scale.

Introducing Application Security Posture Management

Overcoming Application Security’s massive data problem requires a completely new approach to how we operationalize vulnerability remediation, and this is exactly what Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is designed to solve. In a recent Innovation Insight, Gartner defined ASPM as follows:

“Application security posture management analyzes security signals across software development, deployment and operation to improve visibility, better manage vulnerabilities and enforce controls. Security leaders can use ASPM to improve application security efficacy and better manage risk.” – Gartner

Obtaining and analyzing “security signals” requires integrations with various third party technologies as a means of deriving the context necessary to better understand the security implications of vulnerabilities within your enterprise and its environment. To see this in action, let’s revisit the question: “Is this critical more important than that critical?” A robust ASPM solution will provide you context beyond just the vulnerability severity as reported by the security tool. Is this vulnerability associated with an asset that is actually deployed to production? Is the vulnerability internet-facing or internal only? Does either of these vulnerable assets process sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII) or credit card information? By integrating with third party services such as Source Code Management systems and Cloud runtime environments, for example, ASPM is able to enrich vulnerabilities so that appsec teams can make more informed decisions about risk. In fact, with this additional context, an ASPM helps Application Security teams identify those vulnerabilities representing the greatest risk to the organization.

Identifying the most significant vulnerabilities is only the first step, however. The second step is automating the remediation workflow for those vulnerabilities. ASPM enables the scalable dissemination of security vulnerabilities to their respective owners via integration with the ticketing and work management systems already in use by your developers today. Better yet, Application Security teams can monitor the remediation workflow of vulnerabilities to resolution all from within the ASPM. From a collaboration perspective, this is a massive win-win: development teams and appsec teams are able to collaborate on vulnerability remediation using their own respective technologies.

When you put all of this together, you’ll come to understand the greatest value-add provided by ASPM and realized by our customers at Tromzo:

ASPM solutions accelerate the triage and remediation of vulnerabilities representing the greatest risk to the organization at scale.

ASPM Core Capabilities

Effectively delivering on an integrated experience that accelerates the triage and remediation of vulnerabilities representing the greatest risk requires several core capabilities:

  1. The ability to aggregate security vulnerabilities across all scanning tools without impeding your ability to use the best-in-class security testing solutions.
  2. The ability to integrate with and build context from development tools across the CI/CD pipeline.
  3. The ability to derive relationships between the various software assets and security findings from code to cloud.
  4. The ability to express and overlay organizational- as well as team-specific security policies on top of security vulnerabilities.
  5. The ability to derive actions and insights from this metadata that help prioritize and drive to remediation the most significant vulnerabilities.

Doing this effectively requires a tremendous amount of data, connectivity, analysis, and insight. With integrations across 70+ tools, Tromzo is delivering a best-in-class remediation ASPM solution.

How Rapid7 Customers Benefit from an ASPM Solution

By its very nature, ASPM fulfills the need for automation and efficiency of vulnerability remediation via integration across various security testing solutions and development technologies. With efficiency comes real cost savings. Let’s take a look at how Rapid7 customers can realize operational efficiencies using Tromzo.

Breaking Down Security Solution Silos

Rapid7 customers are already amassing best-in-class security testing solutions, such as InsightAppSec and InsightCloudSec. ASPM enables the integration of not only Rapid7 products but all your other security testing products into a single holistic view, whether it be Software Composition Analysis (SCA), Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Secrets Scanning, etc. This effectively breaks down the silos and operational overhead with individually managing these stand-alone tools. You’re freeing yourself from the need to analyze, triage, and prioritize data from dozens of different security products with different severity taxonomies and different vulnerability models. Instead, it’s: one location, one severity taxonomy, and one data model. This is a clear win for operational efficiency.

Accelerating Vulnerability Remediation Through Deep Environmental and Organizational Context

Typical security teams are dealing with hundreds of thousands of security findings and this takes us back to our question of “Is this critical more important than that critical?”. Rapid7 customers can leverage Application Security Posture Management solutions to derive additional context in a way that allows them to more efficiently triage and remediate vulnerabilities produced by best-of-breed technologies such as InsightAppSec and InsightCloudSec. By way of example, let’s explore how ASPM can be used to answer some common questions raised by appsec teams:

1. Who is the “owner” of this vulnerability?

Security teams spend countless hours trying to identify who introduced a vulnerability so they can identify who needs to fix it. ASPM solutions are able to help identify vulnerability owners via the integration with third party systems such as Source Code Management repositories. This automated attribution serves as a foundation to drive remediation by teams and individuals that own the risk.

No more wasted hours!

2. Which vulnerabilities are actually deployed to our production environment?

One of the most common questions that arises when triaging a vulnerability is whether it is deployed to production. This often leads to additional questions such as whether it is internet-facing, how frequently the asset is being consumed, whether the vulnerability has a known exploit, etc. Obtaining answers to these questions is tedious to say the least.

The “code to cloud” visibility offered by ASPM solutions allows appsecteams to quickly answer these questions. By way of example, consider a CVE vulnerability found within a container hosted in a private registry. The code-to-cloud story would look something like this:

  • A developer wrote a “Dockerfile” or “Containerfile” and stored it in GitHub
  • GitHub Actions built a Container from this file and deployed it to AWS ECR
  • AWS ECS pulled this Container from ECR and deployed it to Production

With an integration into GitHub, AWS ECR, and AWS ECS, we can confidently conclude whether or not the Container hosted in AWS ECR is actually deployed to production via AWS ECS. We can even take this further: By integrating within GitHub, we can even map the container back to the corresponding Dockerfile/Containerfile and the team of developers that maintain it.

No more laborious meetings!

3. Does this application process PII or credit card numbers?

Appsecteams have the responsibility of helping their organization achieve compliance with various regulations and industry standards, including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. These standards place emphasis on the types of data being processed by applications, and hence appsec teams can understand what applications process what types of sensitive data. Unfortunately, obtaining this visibility requires security teams to create, distribute, collect, and maintain questionnaires that recipients often fail to complete.

ASPM solutions have the ability to derive context around the consumption of sensitive data and use this information to enrich applicable security vulnerabilities. A vulnerability deployed to production that stands to disclose credit card numbers, for example, will likely be treated with the highest of priority as a means of avoiding possible fines and other consequences associated with PCI DSS.

No more tedious questionnaires!

4. How do I automate ticket creation for vulnerabilities?

Once you know what needs to be fixed and who needs to fix it, the task of remediating the issue needs to be handed off to the individual or team that can implement a fix. This could involve taking hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities, de-duplicating them, and grouping them into actionable tasks while automating creation of tickets in a format that is consumable by the receiving team. This is a complex workflow that not only involves automating correctly formatted tickets with the right level of remediation information, but also tracking the entire lifecycle of that ticket until remediation, followed by reporting of KPIs. ASPM solutions like Tromzo are perfectly suited to automate these ticketing and governance workflows, since ASPMs already centralize all vulnerabilities and have the appropriate contextual and ownership metadata.

Leverage ASPM to Accelerate Vulnerability Remediation

ASPM solutions enable Rapid7 customers to accelerate the remediation of vulnerabilities found by their preferred security testing technologies. With today’s complex hybrid work environments, the increased innovation and sophistication of attackers, and the underlying volatile market, automated code to cloud visibility and governance is an absolute must for maximizing operational efficiency and Tromzo is here to help. Check out www.tromzo.com for more information.

Securely Build AI/ML Applications in the Cloud with Rapid7 InsightCloudSec

Post Syndicated from Kathryn Lynas-Blunt original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/12/22/securely-build-ai-ml-applications-in-the-cloud-with-rapid7-insightcloudsec/

Securely Build AI/ML Applications in the Cloud with Rapid7 InsightCloudSec

It’s been little over a year since ChatGPT was released, and oh how much has changed. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have marked a transformative era, influencing virtually every facet of our lives. These innovative technologies have reshaped the landscape of natural language processing, enabling machines not only to understand but also to generate human-like text with unprecedented fluency and coherence. As society embraces these advancements, the implications of Generative AI and LLMs extend across diverse sectors, from communication and content creation to education and beyond.

With AI service revenue increasing over six fold within five years, it’s not a surprise that cloud providers are investing heavily in expanding their capabilities in this area. Users can now customize existing foundation models with their own training data for improved performance and customer experience using AWS’ newly released Bedrock, Azure OpenAI Service and GCP Vertex AI.

Ungoverned Adoption of AI/ML Creates Security Risks

With the market projected to be worth over $1.8 trillion by 2030, AI/ML continues to play a crucial role in threat detection and analysis, anomaly and intrusion detection, behavioral analytics, and incident response. It’s estimated that half of organizations are already leveraging this technology. In contrast, only 10% have a formal policy in place regulating its use.

Ungoverned adoption therefore poses significant security risks. A lack of oversight through Shadow AI can lead to privacy breaches, non-compliance with regulations, and biased model outcomes, fostering unfair or discriminatory results. Inadequate testing may expose AI models to adversarial attacks, and the absence of proper monitoring can result in model drift, impacting performance over time. Increasingly prevalent, security incidents stemming from ungoverned AI adoption can damage an organization’s reputation, eroding customer trust.

Safely Developing AI/ML In the Cloud Requires Visibility and Effective Guardrails

To address these concerns, organizations should establish robust governance frameworks, encompassing data protection, bias mitigation, security assessments, and ongoing compliance monitoring to ensure responsible and secure AI/ML implementation. Knowing what’s present in your environment is step 1, and we all know how hard that can be.

InsightCloudSec has introduced a specialized inventory page designed exclusively for the effective management of your AI/ML assets. Encompassing a diverse array of services, spanning from content moderation and translation to model customization, our platform now includes support for Generative AI across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Once you’ve got visibility into what AI/ML projects you have running in your cloud environment, the next step is to establish and set up mechanisms to continuously enforce some guardrails and policies to ensure development is happening in a secure manner.

Introducing Rapid7’s AI/ML Security Best Practices Compliance Pack

We’re excited to unveil our newest compliance pack within InsightCloudSec: Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices. The new pack is derived from the OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities for Machine Learning, the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and additional CSP-specific recommendations. With this pack, you can check alignment with each of these controls in one place, enabling a holistic view of your compliance landscape and facilitating better strategic planning and decision-making. Automated alerting and remediation can also be set up as drift detection and prevention mechanisms.

This pack introduces 11 controls, centered around data and model security:

Securely Build AI/ML Applications in the Cloud with Rapid7 InsightCloudSec
Securely Build AI/ML Applications in the Cloud with Rapid7 InsightCloudSec

The Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices compliance pack currently includes 15 checks across six different AI/ML services and three platforms, with additional coverage for Amazon Bedrock coming in our first January release.

For more information on our other compliance packs, and leveraging automation to enforce these controls, check out our docs page.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/12/21/whats-new-in-rapid7-products-services-2023-year-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review

Throughout 2023 Rapid7 has made investments across the Insight Platform to further our mission of providing security teams with the tools to proactively anticipate imminent risk, prevent breaches earlier, and respond faster to threats. In this blog you’ll find a review of our top releases from this past year, all of which were purpose-built to bring your team a holistic, unified approach to security operations and command of your attack surface.

Proactively secure your environment

Endpoint protection with next-gen antivirus in Managed Threat Complete

To provide protection against both known and unknown threats, we released multilayered prevention with Next-Gen Antivirus in Managed Threat Complete. Available through the Insight Agent, you’re immediately able to:

  • Block known and unknown threats early in the kill chain
  • Halt malware that’s built to bypass existing security controls
  • Maximize your security stack and ROI with existing Insight Agent
  • Leverage the expertise of our MDR team to triage and investigate these alerts

New capabilities to help prioritize risk in your cloud and on-premise environments and effectively communicate risk posture

As the attack surface expands, we know it’s critical for you to have visibility into vulnerabilities across your hybrid environments and communicate it with your executive and remediation stakeholders. This year we made a series of investments in this area to help customers better visualize, prioritize, and communicate risk.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
  • Executive Risk View, available as a part of Cloud Risk Complete, provides security leaders with the visibility and context needed to track total risk across cloud and on-premises assets to better understand organizational risk posture and trends.
  • Active Risk, our new vulnerability risk-scoring methodology, helps security teams prioritize vulnerabilities that are actively exploited or most likely to be exploited in the wild. Our approach enriches the latest version of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) with multiple threat intelligence feeds, including intelligence from proprietary Rapid7 Labs research. Active Risk normalizes risk scores across cloud and on-premises environments within InsightVM, InsightCloudSec, and Executive Risk View.
  • The new risk score in InsightCloudSec’s Layered Context makes it easier for you to understand the riskiest resources within your cloud environment. Much like Layered Context, the new risk score combines a variety of risk signals – including Active Risk – and assigns a higher risk score to resources that suffer from toxic combinations or multiple risk vectors that present an increased likelihood or impact of compromise.
  • Two new dashboard cards in InsightVM to help security teams communicate risk posture cross-functionally and provide context on asset and vulnerability prioritization:
  • Vulnerability Findings by Active Risk Score Severity – ideal for executive reporting, this dashboard card indicates total number of vulnerabilities across the Active Risk severity levels and number of affected assets and instances.
  • Vulnerability Findings by Active Risk Score Severity and Publish Age – ideal for sharing with remediation stakeholders to assist with prioritizing vulnerabilities for the next patch cycle, or identifying critical vulnerabilities that may have been missed.

Coverage and expert analysis for critical vulnerabilities with Rapid7 Labs

Rapid7 Labs provides easy-to-use threat intelligence and guidance, curated by our industry-leading attack experts, to the security teams.

Emergent Threat Response (ETR) program, part of Rapid7 Labs, provides teams with accelerated visibility, alerting, and guidance on high-priority threats. Over this past year we provided coverage and expert analysis within 24 hours for over 30 emergent threats, including Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer solution where our security research team was one of the first to detect exploitation—four days before the vendor issued public advisory. Keep up with future ETRs on our blog here.

Detect and prioritize threats anywhere, from the endpoint to the cloud

Enhanced alert details in InsightIDR Investigations

An updated evidence panel for attacker behavior analytics (ABA) alerts gives you a description of the alert and recommendations for triage, rule logic that generated the alert and associated data, and a process tree (for MDR customers) to show details about what occurred before, during, and after the alert was generated.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
Process tree details within alert details in InsightIDR

AI-driven detection of anomalous activity with Cloud Anomaly Detection

Cloud Anomaly Detection provides AI-driven detection of anomalous activity occurring across your cloud environments, with automated prioritization to assess the likelihood that activity is malicious. With Cloud Anomaly Detection, your team will benefit from:

  • A consolidated view that aggregates threat detections from CSP-native detection engines and Rapid7’s AI-driven proprietary detections.
  • Automated prioritization to focus on the activity that is most likely to be malicious.
  • The ability to detect and respond to cloud threats using the same processes and tools your SOC teams are using today with easy API-based ingestion into XDR/SIEM tools for threat investigations and prioritizing remediation efforts.

Detailed views into risks across your cloud environment with Identity Analysis and Attack Path Analysis

We’re constantly working to improve the ways with which we provide a real-time and comprehensive view of your current cloud risk posture. This year, we made some major strides in this area, headlined by two exciting new features:

  • Identity Analysis provides a unified view into identity-related risk across your cloud environments, allowing you to achieve least privileged access (LPA) at scale. By utilizing machine learning (ML), Identity Analysis builds a baseline of access patterns and permissions usage, and then correlates the baseline against assigned permissions and privileges. This enables your team to identify overly-permissive roles or unused access so you can automatically right-size permissions in accordance with LPA.
  • Attack Path Analysis enables you to analyze relationships between resources and quickly identify potential avenues bad actors could navigate within your cloud environment to exploit a vulnerable resource and/or access sensitive information. This visualization helps teams communicate risk across the organization, particularly for non-technical stakeholders that may find it difficult to understand why a compromised resource presents a potentially larger risk to the business.
What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review

More flexible alerting with Custom Detection Rules

Every environment, industry, and organization can have differing needs when it comes to detections. With custom detection rules in InsightIDR, you can detect threats specific to your needs while take advantage of the same capabilities that are available for out-of-the-box detection rules, including:

  • The ability to set a rule action and rule priority to choose how you are alerted when your rule detects suspicious activity.
  • The ability to add exceptions to your rule for specific key-value pairs.

A growing library of actionable detections in InsightIDR

In 2023 we added over 3,000 new detection rules. See them in-product or visit the Detection Library for descriptions and recommendations.

Agent-Based Policy supports custom policy assessment in InsightVM

Guidelines from Center for Internet Security (CIS) and Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) are widely used industry benchmarks for configuration assessment. However, a benchmark or guideline as-is may not meet the unique needs of every business.

Agent-Based Policy assessment now supports Custom Policies. Global Administrators can customize built-in policies, upload policies, or enable a copy of existing custom policies for agent-based assessments. Learn more here.

Investigate and respond with confidence

Faster containment and remediation of threats with expansion of Active Response for Managed Detection and Response customers

Attackers work quickly and every second you wait to take action can have detrimental impacts on your environment. Enter automation—Active Response enables Rapid7 SOC analysts to immediately quarantine assets and users in a customer’s environment with response actions powered by InsightConnect, Rapid7’s SOAR solution.

Active Response has you covered to quarantine via our Insight Agent, as well as a variety of third-party providers—including Crowdstrike and SentinelOne. And with MDR analyst actions logged directly in InsightIDR, you have more expansive, collaborative detection and response faster than ever before. Read what Active Response can do for your organization—and how it stopped malware in a recent MDR Investigation—here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
Active Response in action: Rapid7 MDR analyst activity logged within InsightIDR Investigations timeline

Velociraptor integrates with InsightIDR for broader DFIR coverage

The attack surface is continually expanding, and so should your visibility into potential threats across it. This year we integrated Velociraptor, Rapid7’s open-source DFIR framework, with our Insight Platform to bring the data you need for daily threat monitoring and hunting into InsightIDR for investigation via our Insight Agent.

This integration brings you faster identification and remediation, always-on monitoring for threat activity across your endpoint fleet, and expanded threat detection capabilities. Read more about what this integration unlocks here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
Velociraptor alert details in InsightIDR

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7. See you in 2024!

Expanded Coverage and AWS Compliance Pack Updates in InsightCloudSec Coming Out of AWS Re:Invent 2023

Post Syndicated from Lara Sunday original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/12/20/expanded-coverage-and-aws-compliance-pack-updates-in-insightcloudsec-coming-out-of-aws-re-invent-2023/

Expanded Coverage and AWS Compliance Pack Updates in InsightCloudSec Coming Out of AWS Re:Invent 2023

It seems like it was just yesterday that we were in Las Vegas for AWS Re:Invent, but it’s already been almost two weeks since the conference wrapped up. As is always the case, AWS unveiled a host of new services throughout the week, including advancements around serverless, artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), security and more.

There were a ton of really exciting announcements, but a few stood out to me. Before we dive into the new and updated services we now support in InsightCloudSec, let’s take a second to highlight a few of them and why they’re of note.

Highlights from AWS’ New Service Announcements during Re:Invent

Amazon Bedrock general availability was announced back in October, re:Invent brought with it announcements of new capabilities including customized models, GenAI applications to execute multi-step tasks, and Guardrails announced in preview. New Security Hub functionalities were introduced, including centralized governance, custom controls and a refresh of the dashboard.

Serverless innovations include updates to Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, Amazon ElasticCache Serverless, and AI-driven Amazon Redshift Serverless adding greater scaling and efficiency to their database and analytics offerings. Serverless architectures bring scalability and flexibility, however security and risk considerations shift away from traditional network traffic inspection and access control lists, towards IAM hygiene, system identity behavioral analysis along with code integrity and validation.

Amazon Datazone general availability, like Bedrock, was originally announced in October and got some new innovations showcased during Re:Invent including business driven domains and data catalog, projects and environments, and the ability for data workers to publish and data consumers to subscribe to workflows. Available in open preview for Datazone are automated, AI-driven recommendations for metadata-driven business descriptions and specific columns and analytical applications based on business units.

One of the most exciting announcements from Re:Invent this year was Amazon Q, Amazon’s new GenAI-powered Virtual Assistant. Q was also integrated into Amazon’s Business Intelligence (BI) service, QuickSight, which has been supported in InsightCloudSec for some time now.

Having released our support for Amazon OpenSearch last year, this year’s re:Invent brought some exciting updates that are worth mentioning here. Now generally available is Vector Engine for OpenSearch Serverless, which enables users to store and quickly search vector embeddings for GenAI applications. AWS also announced the OR1 Instance family, which is compute optimized specifically for OpenSearch and also a new zero-ETL integration with S3.

Expanded Resource Coverage in InsightCloudSec

It’s very important to us here at Rapid7 that we provide our customers with the peace of mind to know when their teams leave these events and begin implementing new innovations from AWS that they’re doing so securely. To that end, the days and weeks following Re:Invent is always a bit of a sprint, and this year was no exception.

The Coverage and Analysis team loves a challenge though, and in my totally unbiased opinion — we’ve delivered something special. Our latest release featured new support for a variety of the new services announced during Re:Invent, as well as, a number of existing services we’ve expanded support for in relation to updates announced by AWS. We’ve added support for 6 new services that were either announced or updated during the show. We’ve also added 25 new Insights, all of which have been applied to our existing AWS Foundational Security Best Practices pack, AWS Center for Internet Security (CIS) 2.0 compliance pack, as well as new AWS relevant updates to NIST SP800-53 (Rev 5).

The newly supported services are:

  • Bedrock, a fully managed service that allows users to build generative AI applications in the cloud by providing a set of foundational models both from AWS and 3rd party vendors.
  • Clean Rooms, which enables customers to collaborate and analyze data securely in ‘clean rooms’ in minutes with any other company on joint initiatives without sharing real raw data.
  • AWS Control Tower (January 2024 Release), a management service that can be used to create and orchestrate a multi-account AWS environment in accordance with AWS best practices including the Well-Architected Framework.

Along with support for newly-added services, we’ve also expanded our coverage around the host of existing services as well. We’ve added or expanded support for the following security and serverless solutions:

  • Network Firewall, which provides fine-grained control over network traffic.
  • Security Hub, an AWS’ native service that provides CSPM functionality, aggregating security and compliance checks.
  • Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it easy for analytics users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources, empowering your analytics and ML projects.

Helping Teams Securely Build AI/ML Applications in the Cloud

One of the most exciting elements to come out of the past few weeks with the addition of AWS Bedrock, is our extended coverage for AI and ML solutions that we are now able to provide across cloud providers for our customers. Supporting AWS Bedrock, along with GCP Vertex and Azure OpenAI Service has enabled us to build a very exciting new feature as part of our Compliance Packs.

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and analytics were driving themes of this year’s conference, so it makes me very happy to announce that we now offer a dedicated Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices compliance pack. If interested, I highly recommend you keep an eye out in the coming days for my colleague Kathryn Lynas-Blunt’s blog discussing how Rapid7 enables teams to securely build AI applications in the cloud.

As a cloud enthusiast, AWS re:Invent never fails to deliver on innovation, excitement and shared learning experiences. As we continue our partnership with AWS, I’m very excited for all that 2024 holds in store. Until next year!

NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Updates: What You Need to Know About The Most Recent Patch Release (5.1.1)

Post Syndicated from Lara Sunday original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/12/14/nist-sp-800-53-rev-5-updates-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-most-recent-patch-release-5-1-1/

NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Updates: What You Need to Know About The Most Recent Patch Release (5.1.1)

On November 6th, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued an update to SP 800-53, a NIST-curated catalog of controls that organizations can implement to effectively manage security and privacy risk. In this blog we’ll cover the new and updated controls within patch release 5.1.1, as well as review how Rapid7 InsightCloudSec helps security teams implement and continuously enforce them across their organizations. Let’s dive right in.

Updates to NIST SP 800-53 Compliance Pack: What You Need to Know About Revision 5.1.1

Unlike the large revision that occurred a few years back when Revision 5 was released – which brought with it nearly 270 control updates in aggregate – this update doesn’t have quite the far-reaching implications. That said, there are a few changes to be aware of. Release 5.1.1 added one new control with three supporting control enhancements, along with some minor grammar and formatting structure changes to other existing controls. Organizations are not mandated to implement the new control and have the option to defer implementation until SP 800-53 Release 6.0.0 is issued, however there is no defined timeline for when 6.0.0 will be released.

While there is no mandate at this time, the team here at Rapid7 generally advises our customers to adopt new patch releases immediately to ensure alignment with the most up-to-date best practices and that your team is covered for emerging attack vectors. In this case, we recommend adopting 5.1.1 primarily to ensure you’re effectively implementing encryption and authentication controls across your environment.

The newly-added control is Identification and Authentication (or IA-13) which states that organizations should “Employ identity providers and authorization servers to manage user, device, and non-person entity (NPE) identities, attributes, and access rights supporting authentication and authorization decisions.”

IA-13 has been broken down by NIST into three supporting control enhancements:

  • IA-13 (01) – Cryptographic keys that protect access tokens are generated, managed, and protected from disclosure and misuse.
  • IA-13 (02) – The source and integrity of identity assertions and access tokens are verified before granting access to system and information resources.
  • IA-13 (03) – Assertions and access tokens are continuously refreshed, time-restricted, audience-restrained and revoked when necessary and after a defined period of non-use.

So, what does all that mean? Put simply, organizations should implement controls to effectively track and manage user and system entity permissions to ensure only authorized users are permitted access to corporate systems or data. This includes the proper use of encryption, hygiene and lifecycle management for access tokens.

This is, of course, a much needed and community-requested addition that speaks to the growing awareness and criticality of implementing checks and guardrails to mitigate identity-related risk. A key component of this equation is implementing a solution that can help you detect areas of your cloud environment that haven’t fully implemented these controls. This can be a particularly challenging thing to manage in a cloud environment, given its democratized nature, the sheer volume of identities and permissions that need to be managed and the ease with which improper allocation of permissions and privileges can occur.

Implement and Continuously Enforce NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 with InsightCloudSec

InsightCloudSec allows security teams to establish and continuously measure compliance against organizational policies, whether they’re based on service provider best practices, a common industry framework, or a custom pack tailored to specific business needs.

A compliance pack within InsightCloudSec is a set of checks that can be used to continuously assess your cloud environments for compliance with a given regulatory framework, or industry or provider best practices. The platform comes out of the box with 40+ compliance packs, including a dedicated pack for NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5.1.1, which now provides an additional 14 insights that align to the newly-added IA-13.

The dedicated pack provides 367 Insights checking against 128 NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5.1.1 requirements that assess your multi cloud environment for compliance with the controls outlined by NIST. With extensive support for various resource types across all major cloud service providers (CSPs), security teams can confidently implement and continuously enforce compliance with SP 800-53 Rev 5.1.1.

NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Updates: What You Need to Know About The Most Recent Patch Release (5.1.1)

InsightCloudSec continuously assesses your entire multi-cloud environment for compliance with one or more compliance packs and detects noncompliant resources within minutes after they are created or an unapproved change is made. If you so choose, you can make use of the platform’s native, no-code automation to contact the resource owner, or even remediate the issue—either via deletion or by adjusting the configuration or permissions—without any human intervention.

For more information about how to use InsightCloudSec to implement and enforce compliance standards like those outlined in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5.1.1, be sure to check out the docs page! For more on our cloud identity and access management capabilities, we’ve got some additional information on that here.

Cloud Webinar Series Part 1: Commanding Cloud Strategies

Post Syndicated from Owen Holland original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/10/17/cloud-webinar-series-part-1-commanding-cloud-strategies/

Cloud Webinar Series Part 1: Commanding Cloud Strategies

Over the past decade, cloud computing has evolved into a cornerstone of modern business operations. Its flexibility, scalability, and efficiency have reshaped industries and brought unprecedented opportunities.

However, this transformation has come with challenges—most notably those associated with cloud security. Our new cloud security webinar series will explore the dynamic landscape of cloud security, unveiling key trends, pinpointing critical challenges, and providing actionable insights tailored to security professionals.

In Commanding Cloud Strategies, the first webinar of the series, Rapid7’s Chief Security Officer Jaya Baloo and other experts will share their thoughts on the cloud challenges that security leaders face and offer insights on how to overcome them.

Please register for the first episode of our Cloud Security Series here to find out what our security experts think are the top strategies to overcome these challenges and considerations.

Armed with the knowledge and insights provided in part-one, security professionals will be better equipped to safeguard their cloud environments and data assets in the modern digital landscape.

To learn more, check out the webinar abstract below.

Commanding Cloud Strategies Webinar Abstract

In the ever-evolving world of cloud security, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. Over the past ten years, several trends have emerged, shaping how organizations safeguard their digital assets.

The shift towards a shared responsibility model, greater emphasis on automation and orchestration, and a growing focus on identity and access management (IAM) are among the defining trends.

Cloud Security Challenges

  • Data Privacy and Compliance: Ensuring data protection and regulatory compliance within cloud environments is a persistent challenge. As data becomes more mobile and diverse, maintaining compliance becomes increasingly complex.
  • Evolving Threat Landscape: The threat landscape is in constant flux, with cyberattacks targeting cloud infrastructure and applications growing in sophistication. Security professionals must adapt to this ever-changing landscape to keep their organizations safe.

Considerations in Cloud Security

  • Scalable Security Architecture: Large enterprises must design security architectures that are both scalable and flexible to adapt to evolving cloud infrastructure and workload needs. The ability to scale security measures efficiently is crucial.
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM): Given the intricate web of user roles and permissions in large organizations, effective IAM is essential. Organizations should prioritize IAM solutions that streamline access while maintaining security.

Understanding Risk

Understanding cybersecurity risk is at the heart of cloud security. Effective risk assessment and mitigation involve evaluating internal and external tactics that could compromise an organization’s digital assets and information security. Our security experts will delve into this critical domain’s core challenges and considerations in the session.

Challenges in Understanding Risk

  • Complexity of Cloud Ecosystems: Successful organizations often operate intricate cloud ecosystems with numerous interconnected services and platforms. Navigating this complexity while assessing risk can be daunting.
  • Lack of Skilled Cybersecurity Personnel: The need for more skilled cybersecurity professionals capable of analyzing and managing cloud security risks is a widespread challenge. Organizations must find and retain the right talent to stay secure.

Considerations for Understanding Risk

  • Risk Assessment and Prioritization: Organizations should prioritize the identification and assessment of cloud security risks based on their potential impact and likelihood. Effective risk assessment tools and threat modelling can help in this regard.
  • Continuous Monitoring and Response: Establishing a robust, real-time monitoring system is essential. It allows organizations to continuously assess cloud environments for security incidents and respond promptly to emerging threats. Integrating Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and DevSecOps practices can enhance this capability.

Threat Intelligence

In cloud security, threat intelligence is pivotal in staying one step ahead of potential threats and vulnerabilities. Effective threat intelligence involves collecting, analyzing, and disseminating timely information to protect cloud environments and data assets proactively.

Challenges in Threat Intelligence

  • Data Overload and False Positives: Organizations generate vast amounts of security data, including threat intelligence feeds. Managing this data can lead to data overload and false positives, causing alert fatigue.
  • Integration and Compatibility: Integrating threat intelligence feeds into existing security infrastructure can be complex, as different sources may use varying formats and standards.

Considerations in Threat Intelligence

  • Customization and Contextualization: To make threat intelligence actionable, organizations should customize it to their specific cloud environments, industry, and business context. Tailored alerting rules and threat-hunting workflows can enhance effectiveness.
  • Sharing and Collaboration: Collaborating with industry peers, Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), and government agencies for threat intelligence sharing can provide valuable insights into emerging threats specific to the industry.

Security Capabilities

Cloud security capabilities encompass the ability to comprehend evolving risks, establish benchmark standards, and take immediate, informed actions to safeguard cloud environments and data assets effectively. The final topic in the webinar will explore the core challenges and considerations in building robust security capabilities.

Challenges in Security Capabilities

  • Resource Allocation and Prioritization: Allocating resources effectively across vast cloud environments can be challenging, leading to difficulties prioritizing security efforts and ensuring critical areas receive the necessary attention and investment.
  • Complexity of Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments: Managing security capabilities becomes particularly challenging when organizations operate in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Ensuring consistent security practices and policies across different platforms and providers requires specialized expertise.

Considerations in Security Capabilities

  • Integrated Security Ecosystem: Organizations should strive to create an integrated security ecosystem that combines various security tools, technologies, and processes to provide a comprehensive view of their cloud environment.
  • Scalability and Elasticity: Cloud security capabilities should be designed to scale and adapt to the organization’s evolving cloud infrastructure and workloads. This includes automated resource scaling and continuous security testing.

Why Your AWS Cloud Container Needs Client-Side Security

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/08/24/why-your-aws-cloud-container-needs-client-side-security/

Why Your AWS Cloud Container Needs Client-Side Security

With increasingly complicated network infrastructure and organizations needing to deploy applications across various environments, cloud containers are necessary for companies to stay agile and innovative. Containers are packages of software that hold all of the necessary components for an app to run in any environment. One of the biggest benefits of cloud containers? They virtualize an operating system, enabling users to access from private data centers, public clouds, and even laptops.

According to recent research by Faction, 92% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy in place or are in the process of adopting one. In addition to the ubiquity of cloud computing, there are a variety of cloud container providers, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. Nearly 80% of all containers on the cloud, however, run on AWS, which is known for its security, reliability, and scalability.

When it comes to cloud container security, AWS works on a shared responsibility model. This means that security and compliance is shared between AWS and the client. AWS protects the infrastructure running the services offered in the cloud — the hardware, software, networking, and facilities.

Unfortunately, many AWS users stop here. They believe that the security provided by AWS is sufficient to protect their cloud containers. While it is true that the level of customer responsibility for security differs depending on the AWS product, each product does require the customer to assume some level of security responsibility.

To avoid this mistake, let’s examine why your AWS cloud container needs additional client-side security and how Rapid7 can help.

Top reasons why your AWS container needs client-side security

Visibility and monitoring

Some of the same qualities that make containers ideal for agility and innovation also creates difficulty in visibility and monitoring. Cloud containers are ephemeral, which means they’re easy to establish and destroy. This is convenient for quickly moving workloads and applications, but it also makes it difficult to track changes. Many AWS containers share memory and CPU resources with a variety of hosts (physical and cloud) in your ecosystem. Consequently, monitoring resource consumption and assessing container performance and application health can be difficult — after all, how can you know how much memory is being utilized by the container or the physical host?

Traditional monitoring tools and solutions also fail to collect the necessary metrics or provide the crucial insights needed for monitoring and troubleshooting container health and performance. While AWS offers protection for the cloud container structure, visualizing and monitoring what happens within the container is the responsibility of your organization.

Alert contextualization and remediation

As your company grows and you scale your cloud infrastructure, your DevOps teams will continue to create containers. For example, Google runs everything in containers and launches an epic amount of containers (several billion per week!) to keep up with their developer and client needs. While you might not be launching quite as many containers, it’s still easy to lose track of them all. Organizations utilize alerts to keep track of container performance and health to resolve problems quickly. While alerting policies differ, most companies use metric- or log-based alerting.

It can be overwhelming to manage and remediate all of your organization’s container alerts. Not only do these alerts need to be routed to the proper developer or resource owner, but they also need to be remediated quickly to ensure the security and continued good performance of the container.

Cybersecurity standards

While AWS provides security for your foundational services in containerized applications — computing, storage, databases, and networking — it’s your responsibility to develop sufficient security protocols to protect your data, applications, operating system, and firewall. In the same way that your organization follows external cybersecurity standards for security and compliance across the rest of your digital ecosystem, it’s best to align your client-side AWS container security with a well-known industry framework.

Adopting a standardized cybersecurity framework will work in concert with AWS’s security measures by providing guidelines and best practices — preventing your organization from a haphazard security application that creates coverage gaps.

How Rapid7 can help with AWS container security

Now that you know why your organization needs client-side security, here’s how Rapid7 can help.

  • Visibility and monitoring: Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec continuously scans your cloud’s infrastructure, orchestration platforms, and workloads to provide a real-time assessment of health, performance, and risk. With the ability to scan containers in less than 60 seconds, your team will be able to quickly and accurately track changes in your containers and view the data in a single, convenient platform, perfect for collaborating across teams and quickly remediating issues.
  • Alert contextualization and remediation: Client-side security measures are key to processing and remediating system alerts in your AWS containers, but it can’t be accomplished manually. Automation is key for alert contextualization and remediation. InsightCloudSec integrates with AWS services like Amazon GuardDuty to analyze logs for malicious activity. The tool also integrates with your larger enterprise security systems to automate the remediation of critical risks in real time — often within 60 seconds.
  • Cybersecurity standards: While aligning your cloud containers with an industry-standard cybersecurity framework is a necessity, it’s often a struggle. Maintaining security and compliance requirements requires specialized knowledge and expertise. With record staff shortages, this often falls by the wayside. InsightCloudSec automates cloud compliance for well-known industry standards like the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) with out-of-the-box policies that map back to specific NIST directives.

Secure your container (and it’s contents)

AWS’s shared responsibility model of security helps relieve operational burdens for organizations operating cloud containers. AWS clients don’t have to worry about the infrastructure security of their cloud containers. The contents in the cloud containers, however, are the owner’s responsibility and require additional security considerations.

Client-side security is necessary for proper monitoring and visibility, reduction in alert fatigue and real-time troubleshooting, and the application of external cybersecurity frameworks. The right tools, like Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec, can provide crucial support in each of these areas and beyond, filling crucial expertise and staffing gaps on your team and empowering your organization to confidently (and securely) utilize cloud containers.

Want to learn more about AWS container security? Download Fortify Your Containerized Apps With Rapid7 on AWS.

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

Post Syndicated from James Alaniz original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/08/01/new-insightcloudsec-compliance-pack-for-cis-aws-benchmark-2-0-0/

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) recently released version two of their AWS Benchmark. CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0 brings two new recommendations and eliminates one from the previous version. The update also includes some minor formatting changes to certain recommendation descriptions.

In this post, we’ll talk a little bit about the “why” behind these changes. We’ll also look at using InsightCloudSec’s new, out-of-the-box compliance pack to implement and enforce the benchmark’s recommendations.

What’s new, what’s changed, and why

Version 2.0.0 of the CIS AWS Benchmark included two new recommendations:

  • Ensure access to AWSCloudShellFullAccess is restricted
    An important addition from CIS, this recommendation focuses on restricting access to the AWSCloudShellFullAccess policy, which presents a potential path for data exfiltration by malicious cloud admins that are given full permissions to the service. AWS documentation describes how to create a more restrictive IAM policy that denies file transfer permissions.
  • Ensure that EC2 Metadata Service only allows IMDSv2
    Users should be using IMDSv2 to avoid leaving your EC2 instances susceptible to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attacks, a critical fault of IMDSv1.

The update also included the removal of the previous recommendation:

  • Ensure all S3 buckets employ encryption-at-rest
    This recommendation was removed because AWS now encrypts all new objects by default as of January 2023. It’s important to note that this only applies to newly created S3 buckets. So, if you’ve got some buckets that have been kicking around for a while, make sure they are employing encryption-at-rest and that it can not be inadvertently turned off at some point down the line.

Along with these changes, CIS also made a few minor changes related to the wording in some of the benchmark titles and descriptions.

How does ICS help me implement this in my environment?

Available as a compliance pack within InsightCloudSec right out-of-the-box, Rapid7 makes it easy for teams to scan their AWS environments for compliance against the recommendations and controls outlined in the CIS AWS Benchmark. If you’re not yet using InsightCloudSec today, be sure to check out the docs pages here, which will guide you through getting started with the platform.

Once you’re up and running, scoping your compliance assessment to a specific pack is as easy as 4 clicks. First, from the Compliance Summary page  you’ll want to select your desired benchmark. In this case, of course, CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0.

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

From there, we can select the specific cloud or clouds we want to scan.

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

And because we’ve got our badging and tagging strategies in order (right…….RIGHT?!) we can hone in even further. For this example, let’s focus on the production environment.

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

You’ll get some trending insights that show how your organization as a whole, as well as how specific teams and accounts are doing and whether or not you’re seeing the improvement over time.

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

Finally, if you’ve got a number of cloud accounts and/or clusters running across your environment, you can even scope down to that level. In this example, we’ll select all.

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

Once you’ve got your filters set, you can apply and get real-time insight into how well your organization is adhering to the CIS AWS Benchmark. As with any pack, you can see your current compliance score overall along with a breakdown of the risk level associated with each instance of non-compliance.

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack for CIS AWS Benchmark 2.0.0

So as you can see, it’s fairly simple to assess your cloud environment for compliance with the CIS AWS Benchmark with a cloud security tool like InsightCloudSec. If you’re just starting your cloud security journey or aren’t really sure where to start, utilizing an out-of-the-box compliance pack is a great way to set a foundation to build off of.

In fact, Rapid7 recently partnered with AWS to help organizations in that very situation. Using a combination of market-leading technology and hands-on expertise, our AWS Cloud Risk Assessment provides a point-in-time understanding of your entire AWS cloud footprint and its security posture.

During the assessment, our experts will inspect your cloud environment for more than 100 distinct risks and misconfigurations, including publicly exposed resources, lack of encryption, and user accounts not utilizing multi-factor authentication. At the end of this assessment, your team will receive an executive-level report aligned to the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, participate in a read-out call, and discuss next steps for executing your cloud risk mitigation program alongside experts from Rapid7 and our services partners.

If you’re interested, be sure to reach out about the AWS Cloud Risk Assessment with this quick request form!

Uncover and Remediate Toxic Combinations with Attack Path Analysis

Post Syndicated from James Alaniz original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/06/27/uncover-and-remediate-toxic-combinations-with-attack-path-analysis/

Uncover and Remediate Toxic Combinations with Attack Path Analysis

Particularly at enterprise scale, it’s not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of resources running across your cloud environments at any given time. Of course, these resources aren’t running independently. In modern environments, these resources are all interconnected and in many cases interdependent. This interconnectivity means that if one resource or account is compromised, the whole system is at risk. Should a bad actor gain access to your systems via an open port, there are a number of avenues for them to move laterally across your environment, and even across environments, if your cloud environment is connected to your on-premises network.

Because of this, security teams need to understand how resources deployed across their environment relate to and interact with each other to effectively assess and prioritize risk remediation efforts.

For example, it’s helpful to know whether or not a resource is publicly available and it shouldn’t be, but what if that’s not the whole story? Perhaps that resource also provided an avenue to a database that was housing sensitive customer data, or was assigned a role that enabled it to escalate privileges and cause havoc across your environment. These types of toxic combinations compound risk and widen the potential blast radius should a resource or account be compromised.

Introducing Attack Path Analysis in InsightCloudSec

Attack Path Analysis provides a graph-based visualization that enables users to quickly identify the potential avenues that bad actors could use to navigate your cloud environment to exploit a vulnerable resource and/or access sensitive information.

Uncover and Remediate Toxic Combinations with Attack Path Analysis

With Attack Path Analysis, you can:

  • Visualize risk across your cloud environments in real-time, mapping relationships between compromised resources and the rest of your environment.
  • Prioritize remediation efforts by understanding the toxic risk combinations present in your environment that provide bad actors avenues to access business-critical resources and sensitive data.
  • Clearly communicate risk and the potential impact of an exploit to non-technical stakeholders with easy-to-consume attack path visualizations.

Identifying Toxic Combinations that Compound Risk and Widen the Blast Radius of an Attack

To effectively prioritize remediation efforts for the various risk signals across your environment, you need to take into account exploitability—whether or not a vulnerable account or resource can actually be accessed by a bad actor—and the potential impact should that vulnerable resource be compromised.

As an example, let’s dive into an attack path that highlights a publicly exposed compute instance with an attached privileged role. This can be exceedingly difficult to identify, because there are a variety of reasons that a compute instance might be assigned a set of permissions. When that instance is also publicly accessible, even if not directly, this can quickly become a major issue.

Uncover and Remediate Toxic Combinations with Attack Path Analysis

In this scenario, the environment would be susceptible to account takeover attacks, in which an attacker can gain control of the instance and use its assigned privileges to steal sensitive data such as login credentials, customer data, financial information or intellectual property. Perhaps even worse, the instance could be weaponized to launch attacks on other systems, cause a denial of service (DOS), or distribute malware across your network.

To remediate this issue, you’ll want to perform an audit to understand whether the compute instance needs to have the permissions and privileges it’s been granted and if it needs to be publicly accessible. Chances are, the answer to one or both will be “no”, and you’ll want to close off public access and/or adjust the privileges assigned to the resource in question.

There are a variety of attack paths that can be detected and investigated in InsightCloudSec upon launch, and we’ll continue to add more in the coming quarters. If you’re interested in learning more about Attack Path Analysis in InsightCloudSec, be sure to check out the dedicated docs page!

Casting a Light on Shadow IT in Cloud Environments

Post Syndicated from Ryan Blanchard original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/05/23/casting-a-light-on-shadow-it-in-cloud-environments/

Casting a Light on Shadow IT in Cloud Environments

The term “Shadow IT” refers to the use of systems, devices, software, applications, and services without explicit IT approval. This typically occurs when employees adopt consumer products to increase productivity or just make their lives easier. This type of Shadow IT can be easily addressed by implementing policies that limit use of consumer products and services. However, Shadow IT can also occur at a cloud infrastructure level. This can be exceedingly hard for organizations to get a handle on.

Historically, when teams needed to provision infrastructure resources, this required review and approval of a centralized IT team—who ultimately had final say on whether or not something could be provisioned. Nowadays, cloud has democratized ownership of resources to teams across the organization, and most organizations no longer require their development teams to request resources in the same manner. Instead, developers are empowered to provision the resources that they need to get their jobs done and ship code efficiently.

This dynamic is critical to achieving the promise of speed and efficiency that cloud, and more specifically DevOps methodologies, offer. The tradeoff here, however, is control. This paradigm shift means that development teams are spinning up resources without the security team’s knowledge. Obviously, the adage “you can’t secure what you can’t see” comes into play here, and you’re now running blind to the potential risk that this could pose to your organization in the event it was configured improperly

Cloud Shadow IT risks

Blind spots: As noted above, since security teams are unaware of Shadow IT assets, security vulnerabilities inevitably go unaddressed. Dev teams may not understand (or simply ignore) the importance of cloud security updates, patching, etc for these assets.

Unprotected data: Unmitigated vulnerabilities in these assets can put businesses at risk of data breaches or leaks, if cloud resources are accessed by unauthorized users. Additionally, this data will not be protected with centralized backups, making it difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

Compliance problems: Most compliance regulations requirements for processing, storing, and securing customers’ data. Since businesses have no oversight of data stored on Shadow IT assets, this can be an issue.

Addressing Cloud Shadow IT

One way to address Shadow IT in cloud environments is to implement a cloud risk and compliance management platform like Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec.

InsightCloudSec continuously assesses your entire cloud environment whether in a single cloud or across multiple clouds and can detect changes to your environment—such as the creation of a new resource—in less than 60 seconds with event-driven harvesting.

The platform doesn’t just stop at visibility, however. Out-of-the-box, users get access to 30+ compliance packs aligned to common industry standards like NIST, CIS Benchmarks, etc. as well as regulatory frameworks like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR. Teams also have the ability to tailor their compliance policies to their specific business needs with custom packs that allow you to set exceptions and/or add additional policies that aren’t included in the compliance frameworks you either choose or are required to adhere to.

When a resource is spun up, the platform detects it in real-time and automatically identifies whether or not it is in compliance with organization policies. Because InsightCloudSec offers native, no-code automation, teams are able to build bots that take immediate action whenever Shadow IT creeps into their environment by either adjusting configurations and permissions to regain compliance or even deleting the resource altogether if you so choose.

To learn more, check out our on-demand demo.

Center for Information Security (CIS) unveils Azure Foundations Benchmark v2.0.0

Post Syndicated from Marla Rosner original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/03/23/center-for-information-security-cis-unveils-azure-foundations-benchmark-v2-0-0/

Center for Information Security (CIS) unveils Azure Foundations Benchmark v2.0.0

The Center for Information Security (CIS) recently unveiled the latest version of their Azure Foundations Benchmark—Version 2.0.0. This is the first major release since the benchmark was originally released more than 4 years ago, which could lead you to believe that this update would come with a bunch of significant changes. However, this release actually brings fewer impactful changes than the minor releases that preceded it.

Instead of sweeping changes, the update includes a number of reconciled and renumbered sections along with some refreshed language and branding.

Rapid7 is actively reviewing the new recommendations and evaluating the need and potential of them being made into insights within InsightCloudSec.

So the changes were minor, but what were they?

Of the 10 sections that make up the benchmark, four sections were expanded with new recommendations:

  • Section 1 (Identity and Access Management)
  • This was also the only section that had a recommendation removed.
  • Section 4 (Database Services)
  • Section 5 (Logging and Monitoring)
  • Section 7 (Virtual Machines)

Five sections had no changes:

  • Section 3 (Storage Accounts)
  • Section 6 (Networking)
  • Section 8 (Key Vault)
  • Section 9 (AppService)
  • Section 10 (Miscellaneous)

Section 2 (Microsoft Defender) did not have any additions or subtractions, but did have some alterations related to numbering and categorization.

Section 1 (Identity and Access Management)

This section covers a wide range of recommendations centered around identity and access policies. For 2.0.0, there was one addition:

Recommendation: 1.3 – Ensure that ‘Users can create Azure AD Tenants’ is set to ‘No’

Why it Matters: It is best practice to only allow an administrator to create new tenants. This prevents users from creating new Azure AD or Azure AD B2C tenants and ensures that only authorized users are able to do so.

As noted above, this was also the only section from which a recommendation was removed entirely:

Removed Recommendation: 1.5 – Ensure that ‘Restore multi-factor authentication on all remembered devices’ is enabled (this recommendation has been replaced in v2.0.0)

Why it Was Removed: This recommendation was likely removed, as it is somewhat redundant to what is now recommendation 1.1.4 (Ensure that ‘Allow users to remember multi-factor authentication on devices they trust’ is enabled). Essentially, the updated recommendation asserts you should not allow users to bypass MFA for any device.

Section 4 (Database Services)

This section focuses on securing database services within Azure environments—such as Azure SQL or Cosmos DB. CIS added a recommendation to this section, specifically for Cosmos DB, that guides users to leverage Active Directory and Azure RBAC whenever possible.

Recommendation: 4.5.3 – Use Azure Active Directory (AAD) Client Authentication and Azure RBAC where possible.

Why it Matters: Cosmos DB, Azure’s native NoSQL database service, can use tokens or AAD for client authentication which in turn will use Azure RBAC for authorization. Using AAD is significantly more secure because AAD handles the credentials and allows for MFA and centralized management, and Azure RBAC is better integrated with the rest of Azure.

Section 5 (Logging and Monitoring)

The two new recommendations within this section are targeted toward ensuring you’ve properly configured your environment for log management, including collecting the necessary logs (flow logs, audit logs, activity logs, etc.) and also ensuring that the storage location for those logs is secure.

Recommendation: 5.3.1 – Ensure Application Insights are Configured

Why it Matters: Application Insights within Azure act as an application performance monitoring solution providing valuable data into how well an application performs and additional information when performing incident response. The types of log data collected include application metrics, telemetry data, and application trace logging data, which provide organizations with detailed information about application activity and application transactions. Both data sets help organizations adopt a proactive and retroactive means to handle security and performance related metrics within their modern applications.

Recommendation: 5.5 – Ensure that SKU Basic/Consumption is not used on artifacts that need to be monitored

Why it Matters: Basic or Free SKUs in Azure, while cost effective, have significant limitations in terms of what can be monitored and what support can be realized from the team at Microsoft. Typically, these SKU’s do not have service SLAs, and Microsoft generally refuses to provide support for them. Because of this, Basic/Free SKUs are not recommended for production workloads. While upgrading to the Standard tier may be a bit more expensive, you’ll receive more support from Microsoft, as well as the ability to generate and consume more detailed information via native monitoring services such as Azure Monitor.

Section 7 (Virtual Machines)

Section 7 is focused on securing virtual machines within your Azure environment. Recommendations in this section include ensuring that your VMs are utilizing managed disks and that OS and Data disks are encrypted with Customer Managed Keys (CMK), just to name a few. There was one new recommendation in this section.

Recommendation: 7.1 – Ensure an Azure Bastion Host Exists

Why it Matters: The Azure Bastion service allows organizations a more secure means of accessing Azure Virtual Machines over the Internet without assigning public IP addresses to them. The Azure Bastion service provides Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH) access to Virtual Machines using TLS within a web browser. This is aimed at preventing organizations from opening up 3389/TCP and 22/TCP to the Internet on Azure Virtual Machines.

Using InsightCloudSec to Implement and Enforce CIS Azure Foundations Benchmark 2.0.0

InsightCloudSec continuously assesses your entire cloud environment—whether single cloud or hosted across multiple platforms—for compliance with organizational standards. It detects noncompliant resources and unapproved changes within minutes. The platform continuously monitors your environment to ensure you’ve properly implemented the necessary controls as recommended by CIS for securing your cloud workloads running in Azure environments.

InsightCloudSec can instantly detect whenever an account or resource drifts from compliance. The platform comes out of the box with 30+ compliance packs, including a dedicated pack for the CIS Azure Foundations Benchmark 2.0.0. A compliance pack within InsightCloudSec is a set of checks that can be used to continuously assess your cloud environments for compliance with a given regulatory framework, or industry or provider best practices.

As you can see in the screenshot below, InsightCloudSec has a host of checks and insights that directly align to recommendations within the CIS Azure Foundations Benchmark 2.0.0.

Center for Information Security (CIS) unveils Azure Foundations Benchmark v2.0.0

When you dive deeper into a given insight, you’re provided with detail into how many resources are in violation with a given check and a relative risk score to outline just how risky a given violation is.

Below is an example from CIS Azure Foundations Benchmark 2.0.0, specifically a set of resources that are in violation of the check ‘Storage Account Older than 90 Days Without Access Keys Rotated’. You’re provided with an overview of the insight, including why it’s important to implement and the risks associated with not doing so.

Center for Information Security (CIS) unveils Azure Foundations Benchmark v2.0.0

That platform doesn’t just stop there, however. You’re also provided with the necessary remediation steps as advised by CIS themselves, and if you so choose, the recommended automations that can be created using native bots within InsightCloudSec for folks that would prefer to completely remove the human effort involved in enforcing compliance with this policy.

Center for Information Security (CIS) unveils Azure Foundations Benchmark v2.0.0

If you’re interested in learning more about how InsightCloudSec helps continuously and automatically enforce cloud security standards, be sure to check out the demo!

Reduce Risk and Regain Control with Cloud Risk Complete

Post Syndicated from Marla Rosner original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/03/23/reduce-risk-and-regain-control-with-cloud-risk-complete/

Reduce Risk and Regain Control with Cloud Risk Complete

Over the last 10 to 15 years, organizations have been migrating to the cloud to take advantage of the speed and scale it enables. During that time, we’ve all had to learn that new cloud infrastructure means new security challenges, and that many legacy tools and processes are unable to keep up with the new pace of innovation.

The greater scale, complexity, and rate of change associated with modern cloud environments means security teams need more control to effectively manage organizational risk. Traditional vulnerability management (VM) tools are not designed to keep pace with highly dynamic cloud environments, creating coverage gaps that increase risk and erode confidence.

In the report “Forecast Analysis: Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, Worldwide” Gartner® estimates that “By 2025, more than 90% of enterprise cloud infrastructure and platform environments will be based on a CIPS [cloud infrastructure and platform services] offering from one of the top four public cloud hyperscale providers, up from 75% to 80% in 2021.”

In the face of all this rapid change, how do you keep up?

Rapid7’s Cloud Risk Complete Is Here

The future of risk management is seamless coverage across your entire environment. That’s why our new offer, Cloud Risk Complete, is the most comprehensive solution to detect and manage risk across cloud environments, endpoints, on-premises infrastructure, and web applications.

With Cloud Risk Complete, you can:

  • Gain unlimited risk coverage with a unified solution purpose-built for hybrid environments, providing continuous visibility into your on-prem infrastructure, cloud, and apps, all in a single subscription.
  • Make context-driven decisions by intelligently prioritizing risk based on context from every layer of your attack surface, driven by a real risk score that ties risk to business impact.
  • Enable practitioner-first collaboration with native, no-code automation to help teams work more efficiently and executive-level dashboards that provide visibility into your risk posture.

Cloud Risk Complete

Analyze, respond to, and remediate risks without a patchwork of solutions or additional costs.

LEARN MORE

What makes this solution different is that we started with the outcome and worked backwards to bring to life a solution that meets the needs of your security program.

  • While most solutions offer daily scans of your cloud environment, we deliver real-time visibility into everything running across your environment. So, you’re never working with stale data or running blind.
  • While most solutions only provide insight into a small portion of your environment, we provide a unified view of risk across your entire estate, including your apps, both in the cloud and on-prem.
  • While most solutions show you a risk signal and leave the analysis and remediation process up to you, we provide step-by-step guidance on how to remediate the issue, and can even take immediate action with automated workflows that remove manual effort and accelerate response times.

Risk Is Pervasive. Your Cloud Security Should Be Too

Cloud Risk Complete stands apart from the pack with best-in-class cloud vulnerability assessment and management, cloud security posture management, cloud detection and response, and automation—in a single subscription.

Unlimited ecosystem automation enables your team to collaborate more effectively, improve the efficiency of your risk management program, and save time. With all of this, you can eliminate multiple contracts and vendors that are stretching budgets and enjoy a higher return on investment.

Get comprehensive cloud risk coverage across your business—without compromise. Discover Cloud Risk Complete today.

MITRE ATT&CK® Mitigations: Thwarting Cloud Threats With Preventative Policies and Controls

Post Syndicated from James Alaniz original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/03/16/mitre-attack-mitigations-thwarting-cloud-threats-with-preventative-policies-and-controls/

MITRE ATT&CK® Mitigations: Thwarting Cloud Threats With Preventative Policies and Controls

As IT infrastructure has become more and more sophisticated, so too have the techniques and tactics used by bad actors to gain access to your environment and sensitive information. That’s why it’s essential to implement robust security measures to protect your organization. One way to do this is to utilize the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which provides a comprehensive guide to understanding and defending against cyber threats.

Who is MITRE and what is the MITRE ATT&CK Framework?

MITRE is a non-profit organization supporting various U.S. government agencies across a variety of fields, but primarily focusing on defense and cybersecurity. The MITRE ATT&CK® Framework is a free knowledge base of adversarial tactics and techniques based on real-world observations.

It is a tremendous resource for any security practitioner, and can be used as a foundational resource for developing specific threat models and methodologies in both the public and private sectors. The framework is curated by the folks at MITRE, but anyone is able to contribute information or findings for review, as they look to crowdsource as much intelligence as humanly possible to better serve the broader community.

The ATT&CK Framework is intended to provide insights into the goals of hackers as well as the techniques and tactics they are likely to use. These insights provide organizations and the security teams that protect them with a detailed roadmap to plan, detect, and mitigate risk and detect threats. Once an organization has identified potential attack vectors, it can implement the appropriate mitigations.

Wait, but what are Mitigations?

Under each technique outlined within the ATT&CK Framework is a section on relevant mitigations. Mitigations represent security concepts and classes of technologies that can be used to prevent a technique or sub-technique from being successfully executed. It is a large and comprehensive list, so MITRE has broken these mitigations into two primary groups: “Enterprise,” focusing on mitigations that prevent hackers from breaching a corporate network, and “Mobile,” which—as you might have guessed—is dedicated to protecting against attacks targeting mobile devices.

While these mitigations can not guarantee that you won’t be breached, they serve as a great baseline for teams looking to do whatever they can to avoid an attacker gaining access to their sensitive data.

Example mitigations and what they entail

As noted above, MITRE provides a wide range of mitigations. For the purpose of this post, let’s look at a few example mitigations to give a sense of what they entail.

Before we dive in, a quick note: It’s very important to select and implement mitigations based on your organization’s specific threat landscape and unique aspects of your environment. You’ll want to prioritize the mitigations that address the most significant risks to business operations and data first to effectively mitigate risk and the likelihood of a breach.

Mitigation: Data Backup (ID: M1053)

Backing up data from end-user systems and servers is critical to ensure you’re not at risk of attack types that center around deletion or defacement of sensitive organizational and customer data, such as Data Destruction (T1485) and Disk Wipe (T1561). The only recourse to these types of attacks is to have a solid disaster recovery plan. Security teams should regularly back up data and store backups in a secure location that is separate from the rest of the corporate network to avoid them being compromised. This way, you’ll have the ability to quickly recover lost data and restore your systems to a steady state should a bad actor delete your data or hold it as ransom.

Mitigation: Account Use Policies (ID: M1036)

This mitigation is geared toward preventing unwanted or malicious access to your network via attack types such as brute force (T1110) and multi-factor authentication request generation (T1621). By establishing policies such as limiting the number of attempts a user has to properly enter their credentials and passwords before being locked out of their account, you can thwart bad actors that are simply repeatedly guessing your passwords until they gain access. This control needs to be configured in such a way that effectively prevents these types of attacks, but without being so strict that legitimate users within your organization are denied access to systems or data they need to perform their jobs.

Mitigation: Encrypt Sensitive Information (ID: M1041)

As you can probably guess from the name, this mitigation focuses on implementing strong data encryption hygiene. Given that the end goal of many breaches is to gain access to sensitive information, it will come as no surprise that this mitigation plays a critical role in protecting against a wide range of attack techniques, including adversary-in-the-middle (T1557), improper access of data within misconfigured cloud storage buckets (T1530), and network sniffing (T1040), just to name a few. Properly encrypting data—both at rest and in transit—is a critical step in fortifying against these types of attacks.

There are several MITRE tactics and techniques, such as those highlighted above, where the only mitigation for an attack is to ensure your organization’s security policies and controls are configured properly. While it can be a daunting task to ensure you maintain compliance with all policies and controls across your entire environment, InsightCloudSec offers out-of-the-box insights that are mapped directly to each mitigation.

Leveraging InsightCloudSec to implement and track performance against MITRE ATT&CK Mitigations

With this new pack, InsightCloudSec you can easily audit and assess your entire environment against the recommended mitigations provided by MITRE, and ensure you are taking every step possible to stop bad actors from gaining unauthorized access to your network and accessing sensitive information.

MITRE ATT&CK® Mitigations: Thwarting Cloud Threats With Preventative Policies and Controls

InsightCloudSec continuously assesses your entire cloud environment — whether single cloud or hosted across multiple platforms — for compliance with organizational standards. It detects noncompliant resources and unapproved changes within minutes. The platform continuously monitors your environment to ensure you’ve properly implemented the necessary controls as recommended by MITRE for thwarting attackers, regardless of which technique or sub-technique they utilize.

InsightCloudSec can instantly detect whenever an account or resource drifts from compliance. The platform comes out of the box with 30+ compliance packs, including a dedicated pack for MITRE Mitigations. A compliance pack within InsightCloudSec is a set of checks that can be used to continuously assess your cloud environments for compliance with a given regulatory framework, or industry or provider best practices.

If you’re interested in learning more about how InsightCloudSec helps continuously and automatically enforce cloud security standards, be sure to check out the demo!

On-demand InsightCloudSec Demo

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Cloud Security Strategies for Healthcare

Post Syndicated from Marla Rosner original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/03/14/cloud-security-strategies-for-healthcare/

How to Stay Secure in the Cloud While Driving Innovation and Discovery

Cloud Security Strategies for Healthcare

The healthcare industry is undergoing a transformational shift. Health organizations are traditionally entrenched in an on-prem way of life, but the past three years have plunged them into a digital revolution. A heightened demand for improved healthcare services—like distributed care and telehealth—ignited a major push for health orgs to move to the cloud, and as a result, implement new cloud security strategies.

But the processes and tools that worked well to secure healthcare organizations’ traditional data centers do not directly translate to the public cloud. Resource and budget strain, priority negotiation with leadership, and challenges with regulatory compliance only exacerbate a daunting digital maturity gap. These challenges are why many healthcare organizations have approached public cloud adoption tentatively.

The healthcare industry must innovate in the cloud to meet patient and business needs, but they need to do so without creating unnecessary or unmanaged risk. Most importantly, they must move to and adopt cloud solutions securely to protect patients in a new world of digital threats.

Major Challenges

Modern technologies bring modern challenges. Here are the main obstacles healthcare organizations face when it comes to securing the cloud.

Resource Strain

Like most industries, healthcare organizations face major obstacles when finding qualified security talent. That means hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare businesses must compete with tech giants, startups, and other more traditionally cybersecurity-savvy companies for the best and brightest minds on the market.

What’s more challenging is that the typical day of a security professional in healthcare tends to be disproportionately focused on time-consuming and often monotonous tasks. These duties are often related to maintaining and reporting on compliance with a sea of regulatory standards and requirements. Carrying out these repetitive but necessary tasks can quickly lead to burnout—and, as a result, turnover.

Moreover, those security professionals who do end up working within healthcare organizations can quickly find themselves inundated with more work than any one person is capable of handling. Small teams are tasked with securing massive amounts of sensitive data—both on-prem and as it moves into the cloud. And sometimes, cybersecurity departments at healthcare orgs can be as small as a CISO and a few analysts.

Those challenges with resource strain can lead to worse problems for security teams, including:

  • Burnout and rapid turnover, as discussed above
  • Slow MTTR, exacerbating the impact of breaches
  • Shadow IT, letting vulnerable assets fall through the cracks

Balancing Priorities With Leadership

It’s up to cybersecurity professionals to connect the dots for leadership on how investing in cloud security leads to greater ROI and less risk. Decision-makers in the healthcare industry are already juggling a great deal—and those concerns can be, quite literally, a matter of life or death.

In the modern threat landscape, poor cybersecurity health also has the potential to mean life or death. As medical science tools become more sophisticated, they’re also becoming more digitally connected. That means malicious actors who manage to infiltrate and shut down servers could also possibly shut down life-saving technology.

Tech professionals must illustrate to stakeholders how cybersecurity risk is interconnected with business risk and—perhaps most importantly—patient risk. To do that, they must regularly engage with and educate leadership to effectively balance priorities.

Achieving that perfect balance includes meeting leadership where they’re at. In healthcare, what is typically the biggest security concern for leaders? The answer: Meeting the necessary compliance standards with every new technology investment.

HIPAA Compliance and Protected Health Information

For stakeholders, achieving, maintaining, and substantiating legal and regulatory compliance is of critical importance. When it comes to the healthcare industry, one compliance standard often reigns supreme over all business decisions: HIPAA.

HIPAA provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding Protected Health Information (PHI). It addresses the use and disclosure of individuals’ health information and requires that sensitive information be governed by strict data security and confidentiality. It also obligates organizations to provide PHI to patients upon request.

When migrating to the cloud, healthcare organizations need a centralized approach to protecting sensitive data. InsightCloudSec allows you to automate compliance with HIPAA. Through our HIPAA Compliance Pack, InsightCloudSec provides dozens of out-of-the-box checks that map back to specific HIPAA requirements. For example, InsightCloudSec’s “Snapshot With PHI Unencrypted” policy supports compliance with HIPAA §164.312(a)(2)(iv), Encryption Controls.

Experience Gap

An evolving threat landscape and growing attack surface are challenging enough to deal with for even the most experienced security professionals. Add the health industry’s talent gap into the mix, and those challenges are multiplied.

Cloud security in the healthcare space is still relatively new. That means internal cybersecurity teams are not only playing a relentless game of catch-up—they also might consist of more traditional network engineers and IT pros who have historically been tasked with securing on-premises environments.

This makes it critical that the cloud security solutions healthcare industries implement be user-friendly, low-maintenance, and ultra-reliable.

Cloud Security Solutions and Services

As health organizations dive into work in the cloud, their digital footprints will likely grow far faster than their teams can keep up with. Visibility into these cloud environments is essential to an organization’s ability to identify, assess, prioritize, and remediate risk. Without a clear picture of what they have and where they have it, companies can be vulnerable to malicious attacks.

To avoid biting off more than they can chew, security professionals in healthcare must leverage cloud security strategies and solutions that grant them complete real-time visibility in the cloud over all their most sensitive assets. Enterprise cloud security tools like InsightCloudSec can enable automated discovery and inventory assessment. That unlocks visibility across all their CSPs and containers.

InsightCloudSec also makes it easier for teams, regardless of their cloud security expertise, to effectively define, implement, and enforce security guardrails. With resource normalization, InsightCloudSec removes the need for security teams to learn and keep track of an ever-expanding list of cloud resources and services. Security teams can make use of InsightCloudSec’s native, no-code automation to enable hands-off enforcement of their organization’s security practices and policies when a non-compliant resource is created or a risk configuration change is made.

The fact of the matter is that many healthcare security teams will need to build their cybersecurity programs from the ground up. With limited resources, strained budgets, and patients’ lives on the line, they can’t afford to make big mistakes. That’s why, for many organizations, partnering with a managed service provider is the right approach.

Rapid7’s managed services relieve security teams from the strain of running and building cloud security frameworks. They can also help healthcare security pros better connect lack of investment with risks to stakeholders—acting as an external set of experts.

The Bottom Line

Staying continuously secure in the cloud can be daunting, particularly for those responsible for not only sensitive medical, patient, and research data, but also the digitally connected machines and tools that ensure top-of-the-line patient care. Protecting the health of patients is paramount in the healthcare industry.

With the right tools (and teams) to support continuous security and compliance, this responsibility becomes manageable—and even, dare we say, easy.

InsightCloudSec

A complete cloud security toolbox in a single solution.

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New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack: Key Takeaways From the Azure Security Benchmark V3

Post Syndicated from James Alaniz original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/03/01/new-insightcloudsec-compliance-pack-key-takeaways-from-the-azure-security-benchmark-v3/

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack: Key Takeaways From the Azure Security Benchmark V3

Implementing the proper security policies and controls to keep cloud environments, and the applications and sensitive data they host secure, is a daunting task for anyone. It’s even more of a challenge for folks that are just getting started on their journey to the cloud, and for teams that lack hands-on experience securing dynamic, highly-ephemeral cloud environments.

To reduce the learning curve for teams ramping up their cloud security programs, cloud providers have curated sets of security controls, including recommended resource configurations and access policies to provide some clarity. While these frameworks may not be the be-all-end-all—because let’s face it, there is no silver bullet when it comes to securing these environments—they are a really great place to start as you define and implement the standards that are right for your business. In a recent post, we covered some highlights within the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, so be sure to check that out in case you missed it.

Today, we’re going to dive into the new Azure Security Benchmark V3, and identify some of the controls that we view as particularly impactful. Let’s dig in.

How does Azure Security Benchmark V3 differ from AWS Foundational Security Best Practices?

Before we get started with some specifics from the Azure Security Benchmark, it’s probably worthwhile to highlight some key similarities and differences between the Microsoft and AWS benchmarks.

The AWS Foundational Security Best Practices are, as one might intuitively expect, focused solely on AWS environments. These best practices provide prescriptive guidance around how a given resource or service should be configured to mitigate the risks of security incidents. Because the recommendations are so prescriptive and targeted, users are able to leverage AWS Config—a native service provided by AWS to assess resource configurations—to ensure the recommended configuration is utilized.

Much like the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, the Azure Security Benchmark is a set of guidelines and recommendations provided by Microsoft to help organizations establish a baseline for what “good” looks like in terms of effective cloud security controls and configurations. However, where AWS’s guidelines are laser-focused on AWS environments, Microsoft has taken a cloud-agnostic approach, with higher-level security principles that can be applied regardless of which platform you select to run your mission-critical workloads. This approach makes quite a bit of sense given AWS and Microsoft’s respective go-to-market strategies and target customer bases. It also means implementation of these recommendations requires a slightly different approach.

As noted above, the guidance in the Azure Security Benchmark isn’t tied to Azure specifically, it’s more broad in nature and speaks to general approaches and themes. For example,it recommends that you use encryption and proper key management hygiene, as opposed to specifying a granular resource or service configuration. That’s not to say that Microsoft hasn’t provided any Azure-specific guidance, as many of the guidelines are accompanied by step-by-step instructions as to how you can implement them in your Azure environment. As AWS has provided checks within AWS Config, Azure has similarly provided checks within Defender for Cloud that help ensure your environment is configured in accordance with the benchmark recommendations.

Five recommendations from the Azure Security Benchmark V3 we find particularly impactful

Now that we’ve compared the benchmarks, let’s take a look at some of the recommendations provided within the Azure Security Benchmark V3 that we find particularly impactful for hardening your cloud security posture.

NS-2: Secure cloud services with network controls

This recommendation focuses on securing cloud services by establishing a private access point for the resources. Additionally, you should be sure to disable or restrict access from public networks (when possible) to avoid unwanted access from folks outside of your organization.

DP-3, 4 & 5: Data Protection and Encryption At Rest and In Transit

These recommendations are focused on ensuring proper implementation of data security controls, most notably via encryption for all sensitive data, whether in transit or at rest. Data should be encrypted at rest by default, and teams should use the option for customer-managed keys whenever required.

DP-8: Ensure Security of Key and Certificate Repository

Another Data Protection control, this recommendation is centered on proper hardening of the key vault service. Teams should ensure the security of the key vault service used for the cryptographic key and certificate lifecycle management. Key vault service hardening can be accomplished through a variety of controls, including identity and access, network security, logging and monitoring, and backup.

PA-1: Separate and Limit Highly Privileged/Administrative Users

Teams should ensure all business-critical accounts are identified and should apply limits to the number of privileged or administrative accounts in your cloud’s control plane, management plane, and data/workload plane. Additionally, you should restrict privileged accounts in other management, identity, and security systems that have administrative access to your assets, such as tools with agents installed on business-critical systems that could be weaponized.

LT-1: Enable Threat Detection Capabilities for Azure Resources

This one is fairly self-explanatory, but focuses on ensuring you are monitoring your cloud environment for potential threats. Whether or not you’re using native services provided by your cloud provider of choice—such as Azure Defender for Cloud or Azure Sentinel—you should leverage a cloud detection and response tool that can monitor resource inventory, configurations, and user activity in real time to identify anomalous activity across your environment.

Implement and enforce Azure Security Benchmark V3 with InsightCloudSec

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack: Key Takeaways From the Azure Security Benchmark V3

InsightCloudSec allows security teams to establish and continuously measure compliance against organizational policies, whether they’re based on service provider best practices like those provided by Microsoft, a common industry framework, or a custom pack tailored to specific business needs.

A compliance pack within InsightCloudSec is a set of checks that can be used to continuously assess your cloud environments for compliance with a given regulatory framework, or industry or provider best practices. The platform comes out of the box with 30+ compliance packs, including a dedicated pack for the Azure Security Benchmark V3.

InsightCloudSec continuously assesses your entire cloud environment—whether that’s a single Azure environment or across multiple platforms—for compliance with best practice recommendations, and detects noncompliant resources within minutes after they are created or an unapproved change is made. If you so choose, you can make use of the platform’s native, no-code automation to remediate the issue—either via deletion or by adjusting the configuration or permissions—without any human intervention.

If you’re interested in learning more about how InsightCloudSec helps continuously and automatically enforce cloud security standards, be sure to check out the demo!

CIEM is Required for Cloud Security and IAM Providers to Compete: Gartner® Report

Post Syndicated from Aaron Wells original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/02/15/ciem-is-required-for-cloud-security-and-iam-providers-to-compete-gartner-r-report/

CIEM is Required for Cloud Security and IAM Providers to Compete: Gartner® Report

In an ongoing effort to help security organizations stay competitive, we’re pleased to offer this complimentary Gartner® report, Emerging Tech: CIEM Is Required for Cloud Security and IAM Providers to Compete. The research in the report demonstrates the need for Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) product leaders to adopt trends that can help deliver value across Cloud Security and Identity and Access Management (IAM) enterprises.

CIEM product leaders looking to remain competitive in Cloud Security and IAM practices should consider prioritizing specific capabilities in their planning in order to address new and emerging threats and, as Gartner says:                            

  • Gain a further competitive edge in the CIEM market by investing in more-advanced guided remediation capabilities, such as automated downsizing of over-privileged accounts.
  • Appeal to a larger audience beyond cloud security teams by positioning CIEM as part of broader enterprise security controls.

Businesses not currently prioritizing CIEM capabilities, however, can’t simply “do a 180” and expect to be successful. Managing entitlements in the current sophisticated age of attacks and digital espionage can feel impossible. It is imperative for security organizations to adopt updated access practices though, not only to remain competitive but to remain secure.

Least Privileged Access (LPA) approaches lacking in effectiveness can find support in CIEM tools that provide advanced enforcement and remediation of ineffective LPA methods. Gartner says:

“The anomaly-detection capabilities leveraged by CIEM tools can be extended to analyze the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in the IAM stack. With overprivileged account discovery, and some guided remediation, CIEM tools can help organizations move toward a security posture where identities have at least privileges.”

Broadening the portfolio

Within cloud security, identity-verification practices are more critical than ever. Companies developing and leveraging SaaS applications must constantly grapple with varying business priorities, thus identity permissions across these applications can become inconsistent. This can leave applications — and the business — open to vulnerabilities and other challenges.

When it comes to dynamic multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, it can become prohibitively difficult to monitor identity administration and governance. Challenges can include:

  • Prevention of misuse from privileged accounts
  • Poor visibility for performing compliance and oversight
  • Added complexity from short-term cloud entitlements
  • Inconsistency across multiple cloud infrastructures
  • Accounts with excessive access permissions

Multi-cloud IAM requires a more refined approach, and CIEM tools can capably address the challenges above, which is why they must be adopted as part of a suite of broader enterprise security controls.

Accelerating cloud adoption

Technology and service providers fulfilling IAM services are in critical need of capabilities that can address specific cloud use cases. Gartner says:

“It is a natural extension to assist existing customers in their digital transformation and cloud adoption journey. These solutions are able to bridge both on-premises identity implementations and cloud to support hybrid use cases. This will also translate existing IAM policies and apply relevant elements for the cloud while adding additional use cases unique to the cloud environment.”

In fact, a key finding from the report is that “visibility of entitlements and rightsizing of permissions are quickly becoming ‘table stakes’ features in the CIEM market.”

Mature CIEM vendors can typically be expected to also offer additional capabilities like cloud security posture management (CSPM). InsightCloudSec from Rapid7 is a CIEM solution that also offers CSPM capabilities to effectively manage the perpetual shift, adoption, and innovation of cloud infrastructure. Businesses and security organizations can more effectively compete when they offer strong solutions that support and aid existing CIEM capabilities.

Download the report

Rapid7 is pleased to continually offer leading research to help you gain clarity into ways you can stand out in this ultra-competitive landscape. Read the entire complimentary Gartner report now to better understand just how in-demand CIEM capabilities are becoming and how product leaders can tailor strategies to Cloud Security and IAM enterprises.

Gartner, “Emerging Tech: CIEM Is Required for Cloud Security and IAM Providers to Compete”

Swati Rakheja, Mark Wah. 13 July 2022.

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