Links:

“Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing personal info on 38 public housing applicants”: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20211227/p2a/00m/0na/072000c
LastPass may have suffered a breach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29705957
“Worst AWS Data Breaches of 2021”: https://securityboulevard.com/2021/12/worst-aws-data-breaches-of-2021/
D.W. Morgan: https://www.hackread.com/logistics-giant-d-w-morgan-exposed-clients-data/
SEGA Europe: https://vpnoverview.com/news/sega-europe-suffers-major-security-breach/
“Identity Guide–Preventive controls with AWS Identity–SCPs”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/identity-guide-preventive-controls-with-aws-identity-scps/
Log4j scanner: https://github.com/google/log4jscanner

Transcript

Corey: This is the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition. AWS is fond of saying security is job zero. That means it’s nobody in particular’s job, which means it falls to the rest of us. Just the news you need to know, none of the fluff.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.

Corey: The first security round-up of the year in Last Week in AWS: Security. This is relatively light, just because it covers the last week of the year, where people didn’t really “Work” so much as “Get into fights on Twitter.” Onward.

So, from the community, ever see a data breach announcement that raises oh so very many more questions than it answers? I swear this headline is from a week or so ago, not 1998: “Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing personal info on 38 public housing applicants”. Yes, I said floppy disks.

The terrible orange website, also known as Hacker News, reports that LastPass may have suffered a breach. At the time I write this, the official LastPass blog has a, “No, it’s just people reusing passwords.” Enough people I trust have seen this behavior that I’d be astounded if that were true. If you can’t trust your password manager, ditch them immediately.

Security Boulevard had a roundup of the “Worst AWS Data Breaches of 2021”, and it’s the usual run-of-the-mill S3 bucket problems, but my personal favorite’s the Twitch breach because it’s particularly embarrassing, given that it is, in fact, an Amazon subsidiary.

First one goes to D.W. Morgan by leaking 100GB of client data. And they’re a logistics company that serves giant enterprises, so these are companies with zero sense of humor, so I would not want to be in D.W. Morgan’s position this week.

And the other is a little funnier. It goes to SEGA Europe, after Sonic the Hedgehog forgets to perform due diligence on his AWS environment.

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AWS had only a single thing that I found interesting: “Identity Guide–Preventive controls with AWS Identity–SCPs”. I’ve been waiting for a while for a good explainer on SCPs to come out for a while, and this looks like it actually is a thing that I want. I’ve been playing around with SCPs a lot more for the past couple of weeks. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a way to override what the root user can do in an organization’s member accounts. It’s super handy to constrain people from doing things that are otherwise foolhardy.

And lastly, an interesting tool came out from Google—which I should not have to explain what that is to you folks; they turn things off, like Reader—they also released a log4j scanner. This one scans files on disk to detect the bad versions of log4j—which is most of them—and can replace them with the good version—which is, of course, print statements. And that’s what happened last week in AWS security. Hopefully next week will be… well, I don’t want to say less contentful, but I do want to say it’s at least not as exciting as the last month has been. Thanks for listening.

Corey: Thank you for listening to the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition with the latest in AWS security that actually matters. Please follow AWS Morning Brief on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast—or wherever the hell it is you find the dulcet tones of my voice—and be sure to sign
up for the Last Week in AWS newsletter at lastweekinaws.com.

Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

233: My 5 Favorite Tools For Creating Online Courses, Melvin Varghese, PhD