AWS Morning Brief

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of January 17, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:Comes with a cryptominer: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/01/norton-360-now-comes-with-a-cryptominer/You could be federally charged with wire fraud for paying off a security researcher: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-uber-chief-security-officer-face-wire-fraud-charges-0A source code leak of its Azure App Service: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/24/azure_app_service_not_legit_source_code_leak/“Comprehensive Cyber Security Framework for Primary (Urban) Cooperative Banks (UCBs)”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/comprehensive-cyber-security-framework-for-primary-urban-cooperative-banks/“Disabling Security Hub controls in a multi account environment”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/disabling-security-hub-controls-in-a-multi-account-environment/Ipv6-ghost-ship: https://github.com/aidansteele/ipv6-ghost-shipTranscriptCorey: 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.This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn’t heard of before, but they’re doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they’re using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they’re able to wind up taking what you’re running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I’m somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that’s one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer’s problem and they get out there in public and say, “We’re solving a problem,” it’s very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it’s worth exploring. So, if you’re looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That’s risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Welcome to Last Week in AWS: Security. Let’s dive in. Norton 360—which sounds like a prelude to an incredibly dorky attempt at the moonwalk—now comes with a cryptominer. You know, the thing that use tools like this to avoid having on your computer? This is apparently to offset how zippy modern computers have gotten, in a direct affront to Norton’s ability to make even maxed-out laptops run like total garbage. Speaking of total garbage, you almost certainly want to use literally any other vendor for this stuff now.“What’s the worst that can happen?” Is sometimes a comforting thought when dealing with professional challenges. If you’re the former Uber CISO, the answer to that question is apparently, “you could be federally charged with wire fraud for paying off a security researcher.”And lastly, Azure continues to have security woes, this time in the form of a source code leak of its Azure App Service. It’s a bad six months and counting to be over in Microsoft-land when it comes to cloud.Let’s take a look what AWS has done. “Comprehensive Cyber Security Framework for Primary (Urban) Cooperative Banks (UCBs)”. This is a perfect case study in what’s wrong with the way we talk about security. First, clicking the link to the report in the blog post threw an error; I had to navigate to the AWS Artifact console and download the PDF manually. Then, the PDF is all of two pages long, as it apparently has an embedded Excel document within it that Preview on my Mac can’t detect. The proper next step is to download Adobe Acrobat for Mac in order to read this, but I’ve given up by this point. This may be the most remarkable case of AWS truly understanding its customer mentality that we’ve seen so far this year.Are you building cloud applications with a distributed team? Check out Teleport, an open-source identity-aware access proxy for cloud resources. Teleport provides secure access for anything running somewhere behind NAT: SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, internal web apps, and databases. Teleport gives engineers superpowers. Get access to everything via single sign-on with multi-factor, list and see all of SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, or databases available to you in one place, and get instant access to them using tools you already have. Teleport ensures best security practices like role-based access, preventing data exfiltration, providing visibility, and ensuring compliance. And best of all, Teleport is open-source and a pleasure to use. Download Teleport at goteleport.com. That’s goteleport.com.“Disabling Security Hub controls in a multi account environment”. I hate that this is a solution instead of a native feature, but it’s important. There are some Security Hub controls that are just nonsense. “Oh no, you didn’t encrypt your EBS volumes.” “Oh dear, you haven’t rotated your IAM credentials in 90 days.” “Holy CRAP, the S3 bucket serving static assets to the world is world-readable.” You get the picture.And a tool I found fun, “Port Knocking” is an old security technique in which you attempt to connect to a host on a predetermined sequence of ports. Get it right and you’re now able to connect to the host in question on the port that you want. ipv6-ghost-ship has done something similar yet ever more ridiculous: It takes advantage of the fact that IPv6 means that each EC2 instance gets 281 trillion IP addresses to only accept SSH connections when the last three octets of the IP address on the instance match the time-based authentication code. This is a ridiculous hack, and I love it oh so very much. I’m Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, and this has been Last We...

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures-terrible-security-posture-comes-home-to-roost/Never 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 January 10, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:“Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing personal info on 38 public housing applicants”: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20211227/p2a/00m/0na/072000cLastPass 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/log4jscannerTranscriptCorey: 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.Corey: Are you building cloud applications with a distributed team? Check out Teleport, an open-source identity-aware access proxy for cloud resources. Teleport provides secure access for anything running somewhere behind NAT: SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, internal web apps, and databases. Teleport gives engineers superpowers. Get access to everything via single sign-on with multi-factor, list and see all of SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, or databases available to you in one place, and get instant access to them using tools you already have. Teleport ensures best security practices like role-based access, preventing data exfiltration, providing visibility, and ensuring compliance. And best of all, Teleport is open-source and a pleasure to use. Download Teleport at goteleport.com. That’s goteleport.com.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.

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-the-mostNever 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 January 3, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:“Cloud Security Breaches and Vulnerabilities”: https://blog.christophetd.fr/cloud-security-breaches-and-vulnerabilities-2021-in-review/S3 Bucket Negligence Award: https://mytechdecisions.com/audio/sennheiser-responds-after-customer-data-from-2018-was-exposed-online/Granted the role its support teams use to access customer accounts access to S3 objects: https://Twitter.com/0xdabbad00/status/1473448889948598275?s=12S3 Bucket Negligence Award: https://www.modernghana.com/news/1127205/report-ghana-government-agency-exposes-100000s.html“Simplify setup of Amazon Detective with AWS Organizations”: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/simplify-setup-of-amazon-detective-with-aws-organizations/“AWSSupportServiceRolePolicy Informational Update”: https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2021-007/aws-sso-cli: https://github.com/synfinatic/aws-sso-cliTranscriptCorey: 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: Are you building cloud applications with a distributed team? Check out Teleport, an open-source identity-aware access proxy for cloud resources. Teleport provides secure access for anything running somewhere behind NAT: SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, internal web apps, and databases. Teleport gives engineers superpowers. Get access to everything via single sign-on with multi-factor, list and see all of SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, or databases available to you in one place, and get instant access to them using tools you already have. Teleport ensures best security practices like role-based access, preventing data exfiltration, providing visibility, and ensuring compliance. And best of all, Teleport is open-source and a pleasure to use. Download Teleport at goteleport.com. That’s goteleport.com.Corey: Well, we’re certainly ending 2021 with a whirlwind in the security space. Log4J continues to haunt us, while AWS took not only an outage but also a bit of a security blunder that they managed to turn into a messaging win. Listen on.But first, the Community. A depressing review of 2021’s “Cloud Security Breaches and Vulnerabilities.” Honestly, it seems like there are just so damned many ways for bad security to set the things we care about on fire. The takeaways are actionable though. Stop using static long-lived credentials and start with the basics before you get fancy.Sennheiser scores itself an S3 Bucket Negligence Award, and of all the countries in which to suffer a data breach, I’ve got to say that Germany is at the bottom of the list. They do not mess around with data protection there.And, Holy hell, AWS inadvertently granted the role its support teams use to access customer accounts access to S3 objects. It lasted for ten hours, and while there are mitigations out there, this is far from the first time that AWS has biffed it with regard to an unreviewed change making it into a managed IAM policy. This needs to be addressed. If you’ve got specific questions about how those things are handled, reach out to your account team; but it’s a terrible look. But there’s more to come in a second here.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at Cloud Academy. Something special for you folks: If you missed their offer on Black Friday or Cyber Monday or whatever day of the week doing sales it is, good news, they’ve opened up their Black Friday promotion for a very limited time. Same deal: $100 off a yearly plan, 249 bucks a year for the highest quality cloud and tech skills content. Nobody else is going to get this, and you have to act now because they have assured me this is not going to last for much longer. Go to cloudacademy.com, hit the ‘Start Free Trial’ button on the homepage and use the promo code, ‘CLOUD’ when checking out. That’s C-L-O-U-D. Like loud—what I am—with a C in front of it. They’ve got a free trial, too, so you’ll get seven days to try it out to make sure it really is a good fit. You’ve got nothing to lose except your ignorance about cloud. My thanks to Cloud Academy once again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.A bit off the beaten path, this week’s S3 Bucket Negligence Award goes to the government of Ghana. This one is pretty bad. I mean, you can’t exactly opt out of doing business with your government, you know?Now, AWS has two things I want to talk about. The first is that they offer a way to “Simplify setup of Amazon Detective with AWS Organizations.” I’m actually enthusiastic about this one because there’s a significant lack of security tooling available to folks at the lower end of the market. A bunch of companies seem to start off targeting this segment, but soon realize that there’s a better future in selling things to bigger companies for $200,000 a month instead of $20.Now, “AWSSupportServiceRolePolicy Informational Update.” Now, you heard a minute ago, I was initially extremely unhappy about this mistake. That said, I am such a fan of this notification that I can’t even articulate it without sounding like I’m fanboying. Because mistakes happen and talking about those mistakes and why defense in depth mitigates the harm of those mistakes goes a long way. This affirms my trust in AWS rather than harming it. Meanwhile Azure has absolutely nothing to say about why their tenant separation is aspirational at best.And lastly a bit of tooling story here. To end up the year, I’ve been kicking the tires on aws-sso-cli over on GitHub, which is a tool for using AWS SSO for both the CLI and web console. I don’t know why the native SSO tooling is quite as trash as it is, but it’s a problem. There’s a lot of value to using SSO but AWS hides it as if the entire thing were under NDA. Thank you for listening. It’s been a heck of a year as we’ve launched the security portion of this weekly nonsense. I’ll talk to you more in 2022. Stay safe.Corey: Thank you f...

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/last-year-in-aws Never 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