Securosis Blog

From the Amazon Web Services security blog:

A best practice in this area is to use a bastion. A bastion is a special purpose server instance that is designed to be the primary access point from the Internet and acts as a proxy to your other EC2 instances.

It seems Universities are the latest targets for targeted attackers, looking for a preview of the next set of technologies to come out of the major research universities. But protecting these networks is a herculean task, given the open nature of university operations, which are driven by collaboration and sharing. It makes it tough to protect things when they are fundamentally open.

We don’t know much about last week’s Apple security incident, but a security researcher claims he is responsible, and was just doing research and reporting it to Apple.

As anyone reading this site knows, I have been spending a ton of time looking at practical approaches to cloud security. An area of particular interest is infrastructure encryption. The cloud is actually spurring a resurgence in interest in data encryption (well, that and the NSA, but I won’t go there).

From CNet (and my inbox, as a member of the developer program):

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site…

As we mentioned in the last post, anti-malware tends to be the anchor in endpoint security control sets. Given the typical attacks that is justified, but too many organizations forget the importance of keeping devices up-to-date and configured securely. Even “advanced attackers” don’t like to burn 0-day attacks when they don’t need to. So leaving long-patched vulnerabilities exposed, or keeping unnecessary services active on endpoints, makes it easy for them to own your devices. The progression…

I recently wrote a series on automating cloud security configuration management by taking advantage of DevOps principles and properties of the cloud. Today I will build on that to show you how the management plane can make security easier than traditional infrastructure with a little ruby code. This is another example of material covered in our Black Hat cloud security training class.

After going over the challenges of protecting those pesky endpoints in the introductory post of the Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide, it is now time to turn our attention to the anchor feature of any endpoint security offering: anti-malware. Anti-malware technologies have been much maligned. In light of the ongoing (and frequently successful) attacks on devices ‘protected’ by anti-malware tools, we need some perspective – not only on where anti-malware has been, but where the technology is going,…

One of my favorite industry events was last week, the 2013 Cloud Identity Summit. Last year’s was in Vail, Colorado, so I thought this year couldn’t top that. Wrong. This year was at the Mertiage in Napa – nice hotel, nice Italian restaurant, stunningly helpful staff, and perfect weather made for a great week. And while I was sorely tempted to tour the Napa Valley, I found the sessions too compelling to skip out. Here are a few of the highlights:

Detecting malware feels like a losing battle. Between advanced attacks, innovative attackers, and well-funded state-sponsored and organized crime adversaries, organizations need every advantage they can get to stop the onslaught. We first identified and documented Network-Based Malware Detection (NBMD) devices as a promising technology back in early 2012, and they have made a difference in detecting malware at the perimeter. Of course nothing is perfect, but every little bit helps.