Security on the Cloud doesn’t change drastically from what we have been doing traditionally in our own datacenters. We still need to address: Confidentiality: Confidentiality begins when people, doing their jobs, have a “need to know” to gain access to sensitive resources. Confidentiality is usually provided using the principle of least privilege, which means that…
Category: cloudsecurity
Security Assessment: 7 questions to ask
With everything going on in the cybersecurity space, and a general push towards cloud adoption, security is on top of everyone’s mind. Here are some questions to ask your organization to identify security gaps – Incident Management – How well do we detect, accurately identify, handle, and recover from security incidents? Vulnerability Management – How well do…
Cloud Encryption Challenges
There are myriad factors influencing encryption considerations and associated implementations in the enterprise. The usage of encryption should always be directly related to business considerations, regulatory requirements, and any additional constraints that the organization may have to address. Different techniques will be used based on the location of data, whether at rest, in transit, or…
Cloud Data Storage: Key Threats
Are you using cloud storage services? If yes, then you need to be aware of these key threats. In the cloud, data storage can be manipulated into unauthorized usage, for example, by account hijacking or uploading illegal content. The multitenancy of cloud storage makes tracking unauthorized usage more challenging. Unauthorized access: Unauthorized access can happen due to…
How Cloud impacts Application Security
This article is intended for software development and IT teams who want to securely build and deploy applications in cloud computing environments, specifically PaaS and IaaS. Cloud computing mostly brings security benefits to applications, but as with most areas of cloud technology, it does require significant changes to existing practices, processes, and technologies that were…
QuickGuide: Cloud Incident Response Recommendations
SLAs and setting expectations around what the customer does versus what the provider does are the most important aspects of incident response for cloud-based resources. Clear communication of roles/responsibilities and practicing the response and hand-offs are critical. Cloud customers must set up proper communication paths with the provider that can be utilized in the event of an incident….
QuickGuide: Cloud Security Recommendations
Know the infrastructure security of your provider or platform: In the shared security model, the provider (or whoever maintains the private cloud platform) has the burden of ensuring the underlying physical, abstraction, and orchestration layers of the cloud are secure. Review compliance certifications and attestations. Check industry-standard and industry-specific compliance certifications and attestations on a regular basis for having the…
Common Cloud Security Threats
Cloud deployments, whether public, private, hybrid or community, are susceptible to all the traditional cybersecurity threats and more. Let’s look at the most common threats: Virtual machine attacks: Active VMs are vulnerable to all traditional attacks that can affect physical servers. Once a VM is compromised, it may be able to attack other VMs running…
Weapons of Mass Disruption
Moonlight Maze In 1996, in the infancy of the Internet, someone was rummaging through military, research, and university networks primarily in the United States, stealing sensitive information on a massive scale. Victims included the Pentagon, NASA, and the Department of Energy, to name a very limited few. The scale of the theft was literally monumental,…
Best Practices on OCI Part 3: Logging & Monitoring
Here are some key recommendations for configuring logging and monitoring on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Ensure audit log retention period is set to 365 days – Log retention controls how long activity logs should be retained. Studies have shown that The Mean Time to Detect(MTTD) a cyber breach is anywhere from 30 days in some sectors to up…