We have a major problem. It isn’t really getting better, and soon a critical window of opportunity will close that we can’t afford to lose. I don’t say this lightly, and I think anyone who has read my prior work knows I am not prone to FUD. No one can possibly know the actual percentage of enterprise workloads and applications that have moved to cloud, but every statistic I could find estimates that, at most, it is somewhere in the range of 25% (here’s one Gartner take).…
I just published a piece on Apple Intelligence at TidBITS that I’m pretty excited to release. I wrote it (literally sitting poolside on vacation) to try and explain why this matters to someone even if they don’t know anything about AI or security. For those of us in cloud security, some really interesting things are going on:
TL;DR: Back in December, I took a job as head of strategy and technology for a candy-importing company called Dorval Trading. To explain the move I dusted off the confessor structure, and also performed a POPE evaluation of the opportunity below. I’ll be teaching at Black Hat this summer, so I hope to see many of you there. Otherwise you can always reach me at my Securosis email, at least until Rich cancels my account.
The next phase of cloud security won’t be about shiny new products or services, although we’ll have those. It won’t be about stopping the next world-ending cloud 0-day, but we’ll continue trying to prevent them. It won’t be about AI, but we’ll still have to do something with AI to appease our machine overlords. It will be about making cloud deployments more inherently secure through better, smarter defaults, and better, smarter, and yes, cheaper, built-in…
I’ve been teaching cloud incident response with Will Bengtson at Black Hat for a few years now, and one of the cool side effects of running training classes is that we are forced to document our best practices and make them simple enough to explain. (BTW — you should definitely sign up for the 2024 version of our class before the price goes up!) One of the more amusing moments was the first year we taught the class, when I realized I was trying to hand-write all the required CloudTrail…
A year or so ago I was on an application security program assessment project in one of those very large enterprises. We were working with the security team and they had all the scanners, from SAST/SCA to DAST to vulnerability assessment, but their process was really struggling. It took a long time for bugs to get fixed, things were slow to get approved and deployed, and remediating in-production vulnerabilities could also be slow and inefficient. At one point I asked how vulnerabilities…
The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Hey Chris, want to co-present at RSA? I have this idea around how we fix things when we get dropped into a new org and they have a cloud security mess.”
Look, we don’t yet know what really happened at Sisense. Thanks to Brian Krebs and CISA, combined with the note sent out by the CISO (bottom of this post), it’s pretty obvious the attackers got a massive trove of secrets. Just look at that list of what you have to rotate. It’s every cred you ever had, every cred you ever thought of, and the creds of your unborn children and/or grandchildren. Brian’s article has basically one sentence that describes the breach:
Nearly everyone in the United States (and probably elsewhere) is infected with the Epstein-Barr virus at some point in their life. Most people will never develop symptoms, although a few end up with mono. Even without symptoms you carry this invasive genetic material for life. There’s no cure, and EBV causes some people to develop cancers and possibly Multiple Sclerosis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and other problems. Those later diseases are likely caused by some other precipitating even…
“All cloud security failures are IAM failures, and all IAM failures are governance failures." — me on Twitter (too many years ago to find)