Protecting ITaaS Consoles

There has been quite a bit written about Code Spaces and how unauthorized access to its ITaaS console granted enough permissions to delete everything out of Amazon, including backups. There are lessons here not only for tenants, but also for those vendors who create ITaaS consoles, such as VMware (vCHS, vCD, vCAC, vCenter, Orchestrator, etc.), …

Lessons We Can Learn from the Code Spaces Attack

It was all over the web on June 18: Code Spaces went off the air, as we discussed during the Virtualization Security Podcast on 6/19. The reasons are fairly normal in the world of IT and the cloud. They were hacked. Not by subverting the Amazon cloud, but in ways considered more traditional—even mundane. An …

Security Discussion: Backup and Scripting

During the last two Virtualization Security Podcasts, the panel discussed backups as well as scripting related to backups and in general. We went further to discuss the security implications surrounding backups, including whether or not a recovery is required when a site is hacked. The latter raises an important question: what constitutes a disaster that …

Securing Clouds from Service Providers

Secure multi-tenancy is not just about ensuring security and segregation between tenants. It is also about limiting, auditing, and tracking the activities of a cloud service provider within a tenancy or that touches upon more than one tenant, which of course includes any activity that occurs within the hypervisor, storage, or other layers of the …

Security DevOps (SecDevOps)

At InfoSec World a few weeks ago, I was in a talk with Rich Mogull (@rmogull) of Securosis. Rich spoke on the concept of SecDevOps while demonstrating how he applies this concept to workloads running within Amazon. Now, some would argue that DevOps already contains security practices within the workflows. The unfortunate reality is that, …