AWS Morning Brief

Corey’s livetweet: https://twitter.com/quinnypigEric Hammond’s old article: https://alestic.com/2014/09/aws-root-password/Lightspin found a vulnerability: https://blog.lightspin.io/aws-rds-critical-security-vulnerabilityExpel’s incident report: https://expel.com/blog/incident-report-from-cli-to-console-chasing-an-attacker-in-aws/Rhino Security Labs found a CVE in the AWS VPN Client: https://rhinosecuritylabs.com/aws/cve-2022-25165-aws-vpn-client/DarkReading’s profile of AJ Yawn: https://www.darkreading.com/edge-articles/bytechek-founder-aj-yawn-brings-discipline-to-everything-he-doesNotGitBleed: https://www.notgitbleed.com/AWS Security Bulletins: https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2022-005/ https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2022-004/gimme-aws-creds: https://github.com/Nike-Inc/gimme-aws-credsChamber: https://github.com/segmentio/chamber#lastweekinaws slack channel: https://og-aws-slack.lexikon.io/

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/shitposting-as-a-learning-styleNever miss an episodeJoin the Last Week in AWS newsletterSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsHelp the showLeave a reviewShare your feedbackSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Corey up to?Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)See our recent work at the Duckbill GroupApply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 18, 2022 with Corey Quinn.

Links:CashMama gets the S3 Bucket Negligence AwardMailChimp’s cryptocurrency clients' mailing-list info stolenDenonia, the first Lambda-specific malware AWS IAM Access Analyzer

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/taking-aws-account-logins-for-grantedNever miss an episodeJoin the Last Week in AWS newsletterSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsHelp the showLeave a reviewShare your feedbackSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Corey up to?Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)See our recent work at the Duckbill GroupApply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 11, 2022 with Corey Quinn.

Links Referenced:Okta’s CEO: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-04/okta-ceo-says-breach-is-big-deal-aims-to-restore-trusttaken a job as a Distinguished Engineer VP at AWS: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6914280317675614208/Ubiquiti has sued Brian Krebs for defamation: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/30/ubiquiti_brian_krebs/“Best practices: Securing your Amazon Location Service resources”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/best-practices-securing-your-amazon-location-service-resources/Access Undenied: https://github.com/ermetic/access-undenied-awsaws-keys-sectool: https://github.com/toshke/aws-keys-sectoolTranscriptCorey: 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: Today’s episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that’s built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you’re defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It’s getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that’s exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn’t eat all the data you’ve gotten on the system, it’s exactly what you’ve been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That’s min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: A somehow quiet week as we all grapple with the recent string of security failures from, well, take your pick really.A bit late but better than never, Okta’s CEO admits the LAPSUS$ hack has damaged trust in the company. The video interview is surprisingly good in parts, but he ruins the, “Third-party this, third-party that, no—it was our responsibility, and our failure” statement by then saying that they no longer do business with Sitel—the third-party who was responsible for part of this breach. Crisis comms is really something to figure out in advance of a crisis, so you don’t get in your own way.Paul Vixie, creator of a few odds and ends such as DNS, has taken a job as a Distinguished Engineer VP at AWS and I look forward to misusing more of his work as databases. He’s apparently in the security org which is why I’m talking about today and not Monday.And of course, as I’ve been ranting about in yesterday’s newsletter and on Twitter, Ubiquiti has sued Brian Krebs for defamation. Frankly they come off as far, far worse for this than they did at the start. My position has shifted from one of sympathy to, “Well, time to figure out who sells a 10Gbps switch that isn’t them.”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.AWS had an interesting post: “Best practices: Securing your Amazon Location Service resources”. AWS makes a good point here. It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d need to treat location data particularly specially, but of course you do. The entire premise of the internet falls apart if it suddenly gets easier to punch someone in the face for something they said on Twitter.And two tools of note this week for you. Access Undenied parses AWS AccessDenied CloudTrail events, explains the reasons for them, and offers actionable fixes. And aws-keys-sectool does something obvious in hindsight: Making sure that any long-lived credentials on your machine are access restricted to your own IP address. Check it out. And that’s what happened last week in AWS security. Continue to make good choices because it seems very few others are these days.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.

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/ubiquiti-teaches-aws-security-and-crisis-comms-via-counterexampleNever miss an episodeJoin the Last Week in AWS newsletterSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsHelp the showLeave a reviewShare your feedbackSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Corey up to?Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)See our recent work at the Duckbill GroupApply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 4, 2022 with Corey Quinn.

Links:Their investigation of the January 2022 Okta compromise: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-investigation-of-the-january-2022-okta-compromise/You know it’s a legit AWS email because the instructions are very bad: https://Twitter.com/0xdabbad00/status/1506258309715673089sabotaged their own package: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/big-sabotage-famous-npm-package-deletes-files-to-protest-ukraine-war/“AWS IAM Demystified”: https://www.daan.fyi/writings/iamfrom a third-party: https://www.opsmorph.com/Blog/usergroupspoofing“Generate logon messages for security and compliance in Amazon WorkSpaces.”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/desktop-and-application-streaming/generate-logon-messages-for-security-and-compliance-in-amazon-windows-workspaces/“Ransomware mitigation: Using Amazon WorkDocs to protect end-user data”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/ransomware-mitigation-using-amazon-workdocs-to-protect-end-user-data/“CVE-2022-0778 awareness”: https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2022-003/ElectricEye: https://github.com/jonrau1/ElectricEyeTranscriptCorey: 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: Today’s episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that’s built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you’re defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It’s getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that’s exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100-megabyte binary that doesn’t eat all the data you’ve gotten on the system, it’s exactly what you’ve been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That’s min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: The Okta breach continues to reverberate. As of this recording, the real damage remains the lack of clear, concise, and upfront communication about this. It’s become very clear that had the Lapsus$ folks not gone public about the breach, Okta certainly never would have either.Now, from the community. Let’s see what they had to say. Cloudflare has posted the results of their investigation of the January 2022 Okta compromise to their blog post and I have a few things I want to say about it.First, I love that they do this. I would be a bit annoyed at them taking digs at other companies except for the part where they’re at least as rigorous in investigations that they post about their own security and uptime challenges. Secondly, they’ve been levelheaded and remarkably clear in their communication around the issue which only really affects them as an Okta customer. Okta themselves have issued a baffling series of contradicting claims. Regardless of the truth of what happened from a security point of view, the lack of ability to quickly and clearly articulate the situation means that Okta is now under a microscope for folks who care about security—which basically rounds to every last one of their customers.Now, I generally don’t talk too much about tweets because this is Twitter revisited as a general rule, but Scott Piper had an issue about trying to keep his flaws.cloud thing open, and he got an account being closed down notice from AWS. And a phrase he used that I loved was, “You know it’s a legit AWS email because the instructions are very bad.”I really can’t stress enough that while clear communication is always a virtue, circumstances involving InfoSec, fraud, account closures, and similar should all be ones in which particular care is taken to exactly what you say and how you say it.An NPM package maintainer sabotaged their own package to protest the war in Ukraine, which is a less legitimate form of protest than many others. There’s never been a better time to make sure you’re pinning dependencies in your various projects.It’s always worth reading an article titled “AWS IAM Demystified” because it’s mystifying unless you’re one of a very small number of people. I learned new things myself by doing that and you probably will too.And oof. A while back Cognito User Groups apparently didn’t have delimiter detection working quite right. As a result, you could potentially get access to groups you weren’t supposed to be part of. While AWS did update some of their documentation and fix the problem, it’s a security issue without provable customer impact, so of course, we’re learning about it from a third-party: Opsmorph in this case. Good find.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: Now, from the mouth of the AWS horse itself, “Generate logon messages for security and compliance in Amazon WorkSpaces.” for compliance, sure. For security, can you name a single security benefit to having a logon message greet users? “It reminds them that—” Yeah, yeah, nobody reads the popup ever again after the first...