Learn how cybersecurity professionals have been adapting their practices
Posted: August 6, 2020 Filed under: Information Security Management, Security Strategy, Skills Development | Tags: Agile, Cyber Leave a comment
I had a chance to contribute to a free eBook by Cisco on adapting to the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. Check it out for advice on securing your remote workforce, improving security culture, adjusting your processes and more.
Software and Security Engineering
Posted: July 26, 2020 Filed under: Risk Management, Security Architecture, Skills Development, Software Security | Tags: Software Security Leave a comment
The Software and Security Engineering course taught at the University of Cambridge is available for free online. It includes video lectures, slide decks, reading materials and more.
Whether you are new to information security or a seasoned professional, this course will help you build solid foundations.
Lecture 9 covering critical systems is my favourite. It bring together previous discussions on psychology, usability and software engineering in the context of safety. It adds to the array of the case studies from Lecture 6, focusing on software failures and what we can learn from them. It also offers a fascinating analysis of the Therac-25 accidents and Boeing 737 Max crashes.
AWS Machine Learning course
Posted: July 14, 2020 Filed under: AI | Tags: AI, AWS, ML Leave a comment
I recently completed this AWS Machine Learning course on Coursera (it’s free!). Besides covering basic theory behind machine learning, it discusses common use cases and how AWS services can be applied to them. Overall, it’s quite quick, interesting and doesn’t require deep technical skills.
Small business resilience toolkit
Posted: July 2, 2020 Filed under: Security Strategy | Tags: Resilience Leave a comment
Developing a resilient business is about identifying what your business can’t afford to lose and planning for how to prevent loss should a disaster occur. While this may seem a daunting task, determining your business’s resiliency strategy is more straightforward than you might think.
This resilience toolkit developed by Facebook provides a framework for small businesses that may not have the time or resources to create an extensive plan to recover from business interruptions.
You don’t have to use Facebook’s crisis response features for this approach to be effective – the value comes from the taking the time to assess the risks and plan you response strategy.
Download the Small business resilience toolkit
Cyber security in the Oil & Gas industry
Posted: June 29, 2020 Filed under: Cyber, Industrial Control Systems Security, Security Strategy | Tags: Cyber, Operational Technology, Security Leave a comment
Oil & Gas has always been an industry affected by a wide range of geopolitical, economical and technological factors. The energy transition is one of the more recent macro trends impacting every player in the sector.
Companies are adjusting their business models and reorganising their organisational structures to prepare for the shift to renewable energy. They are becoming more integrated, focusing on consumers’ broader energy needs all the while reducing carbon emissions and addressing sustainability concerns.
To enable this, the missing capabilities get acquired and unwanted assets get divested. Cyber security has a part to play during divestments. preventing business disruption and data leaks during handover. In acquisition scenarios, supporting due diligence and secure integration becomes a focus.
Digital transformation is also high on many boards’ agenda. While cyber security experts are still grappling with the convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) domains, new solutions are being tried out: drones are monitoring for environmental issues, data is being collected from IoT sensors and crunched in the Cloud with help of machine learning. These are deployed alongside existing legacy systems in the geographically distributed infrastructure, adding complexity and increasing attack surface.
It’s hard, it seems, to still get the basics right. Asset control, vulnerability and patch management, network segregation, supply chain risks and poor governance are the problems still waiting to be solved.
The price for neglecting security can be high: devastating ransomware crippling global operations, industrial espionage and even a potential loss of human life as demonstrated by recent cyberattacks.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. There are many things to be hopeful for. Oil & Gas is an industry with a strong safety culture. The same processes are often applied in both an office and an oil rig. People will actually intervene and tell you off if you are not holding the handrail or carrying a cup of coffee without a lid.
To be effective, cyber security needs to build on and plug into these safety protocols. In traditional IT environments, confidentiality is often prioritised. Here, safety and availability are critical. Changing the mindset, and adopting safety-related principles (like ALARP: as low as resonantly practicable) and methods (like Bowtie to visualise cause and consequence relationships in incident scenarios) when managing risk is a step in the right direction.
Photo by Jonathan Cutrer.
How to pass the AWS Security – Specialty exam
Posted: May 20, 2020 Filed under: Career Opportunities, Cloud Computing Security, Information Security, Skills Development | Tags: AWS, Security Leave a comment
I previously wrote about how to prepare for the Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exams. Today, I would like to focus on AWS Security – Specialty.
Exam cost aside, preparing for this specialty can be rather expensive. There is a whole industry around mock practice tests, study books, video tutorials and hands-on labs. Here I’ll aim to outline how to maximise the benefit while minimising costs, focusing on free resources.
Whitepapers, user guides and service FAQs
AWS documentation is arguably the best source of study material out there. I don’t know a single person who passed the exam without reading through at least some of them. Check out the official exam guide for the overview of domains to select the relevant ones. I focused on IAM, KMS, CloudTail, CloudWatch, VPC, Lambda, Inspector, GuardDuty, Athena, Macie and AWS Microsoft AD. At a very minimum, you should read these:
I also wrote about my experience in using security-related AWS services in my blog.
Online courses
Who needs paid for online tutorials when the AWS YouTube channel has a lot of their re:Invent talks available for free? There is literally a video on pretty much every subject you are interested in. There are too many to mention and you could conduct a simple search to find the latest talk on what you want, but I’ll recommend a few to get you started:
- Become an IAM Policy Master in 60 Minutes or Less
- Best Practices for Implementing AWS Key Management Service
- A Deep Dive into AWS Encryption Services
- Best Practices for DDoS Mitigation on AWS
- Advanced Security Best Practices Masterclass
- Your Virtual Data Center: VPC Fundamentals and Connectivity Options
- AWS PrivateLink: Fundamentals
- AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory Deep Dive
- Understanding AWS Secrets Manager
- Amazon Athena
- Amazon GuardDuty
- Amazon Macie: Data Visibility Powered by Machine Learning
- Introduction to AWS Security Hub
If you would rather have a structured online course instead and don’t mind paying a little bit for it, I recommend the Linux Academy and/or A Cloud Guru. I’ve done them both. Personally, I preferred the former as it had some hands-on labs, but A Cloud Guru is shorter and has some good exam tips. Besides, you can try both of them for free for 7 days and decide for yourself.
There is also the official AWS Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Security – Specialty course. It covers the exam structure, gives you tips on tackling questions and provides thorough explanations. I would save this one for last to get a view of your preparedness.
Practice tests
The obvious thing to do is to buy the official practice exam from AWS, right? Well, maybe not. Unless you’ve got it for free for passing one of the other AWS exams previously, you might be better off finding an alternative. It only includes 20 questions (which works out at $2 per question plus tax), and you don’t get to see the answers! Instead, you are presented with a pass/fail summary that gives you the overall percentage broken down by exam domains. You might be better off using the free 15 questions from Whizlabs, although I can’t recommend their paid products. Practice tests are also included in the Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru courses I mentioned above. Plus, the free official Exam Readiness course also comes with 24 questions with answers and explanations at the end. That should be enough to give you the feel for types of question on the exam.
Getting ready
When revising, I found some good notes and a mindmap from other students on the internet. You can also go through a set of flashcards (e.g. on Quizlet) to recap on what you’ve learned.
With all this preparation, don’t lose track of why you are doing it in the first place: gaining the skills that you can apply in practice. The exam gives a good indication of your weaker areas and encourages you to fill these gaps. The best way to do this is, of course, through hands-on experience. If your organisation relies on AWS, find ways to apply the newly acquired knowledge there to make your cloud infrastructure more secure. If that’s not an option, there is always the Free Tier, where you can put your skills into practice. Finally, the Linux Academy (and some other providers) for a small cost offer you some hands-on labs and even a whole sandboxed playground for you to experiment in.
AWS constantly evolve and refine their services, and add new ones too. Keep this in mind while studying, as things move pretty fast in the cloud world. This also means that your learning is never finished, even if you pass the exam. But I think this is a good thing and I’m sure you agree!
About me
Posted: May 1, 2020 Filed under: Career Opportunities, Research, Skills Development | Tags: Cyber Leave a commentThank you for visiting my website. I’m often asked how I started in the field and what I’m up to now. I wrote a short blog outlining my career progression.
AWS Security Hub: all your security alerts in one place
Posted: April 16, 2020 Filed under: Cloud Computing Security, Compliance, Cyber, DevSecOps, PCI DSS, Software Security | Tags: AWS, Cloud, DevSecOps, Security Leave a comment
If you are following my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been focusing on security-specific AWS services in my previous several posts. It’s time to bring them all together into one consolidated view. I’m talking, of course, about the AWS Security Hub.
Security Hub allows you to aggregate and centrally analyse security alerts and findings from Config, GuardDuty, IAM, Inspector, Firewall Manager and more.
You can group, filter and prioritise findings from these services in many different ways. And, of course, you can visualise and make dashboards out of them.
Apart from consolidating findings from other services, it also assesses your overall AWS configuration against PCI DSS and/or the CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark, which covers identity and access management, logging, monitoring and networking, giving you the overall score (example below) and actionable steps to improve your security posture.
Similar to the many other AWS services, Security Hub is regional, so it will need to be configured in every active region your organisation operates. I also recommend setting up your security operations account as a Security Hub master account and then inviting all other accounts in your organisation as members for centralised management (as described in this guidance or using a script).
If you are not a big fan of the Security Hub’s interface or don’t want to constantly switch between regions, the service sends all findings to CloudWatch Events by default, so you can forward them on to other AWS resources or external systems (e.g. chat or ticketing systems) for further analysis and remediation. Better still, you can configure automated response using Lambda, similar to what we did with Inspector findings discussed previously.
Setting up a Web Application Firewall in AWS
Posted: April 15, 2020 Filed under: Cloud Computing Security, Cyber, DevSecOps, Software Security | Tags: AWS, Cloud, DevSecOps 1 Comment
I wrote about automating application security testing in my previous blog. If you host your application or API on AWS and would like an additional layer of protection agains web attacks, you should consider using AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).
It is relatively easy to set up and Amazon kindly provide some preconfigured rules and tutorials. AWS WAF is deployed in front of CloudFront (your CDN) and/or Application Load Balancer and inspects traffic before it reaches your assets. You can create multiple conditions and rules to watch for.
If you’ve been configuring firewalls in datacentres before the cloud services became ubiquitous, you will feel at home setting up IP match conditions to blacklist or whitelist IP addresses. However, AWS WAF also provides more sophisticated rules for detecting and blocking known bad IP addresses, SQL Injections and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.
Additionally, you can chose to test your rules first, counting the times it gets triggered rather than setting it to block requests straight away. AWS also throw in a standard level of DDoS protection (AWS Shield) with WAF at no extra cost, so there is really no excuse not to use it.
Automating the detection and remediation of security vulnerabilities in AWS
Posted: April 14, 2020 Filed under: Agile, Cloud Computing Security, DevSecOps, Information Security, Software Security | Tags: AWS, Cloud, DevSecOps, Security 1 Comment
If you rely on EC2 instances in at least some parts of your cloud infrastructure, it is important to reduce the attack surface by hardening them. You might want to check out my previous blogs on GuardDuty, Config, IAM and CloudTrail for other tips on securing your AWS infrastructure. But today we are going to be focusing on yet another Amazon service – Inspector.
To start with, we need to make sure the Inspector Agent is installed on our EC2 instances. There are a couple of ways of doing this and I suggest simply using the Inspector service Advance Setup option. In addition, you can specify the instances you want to include in your scan as well as its duration and frequency. You can also select the rules packages to scan against.
After the agent is installed, the scan will commence in line with the configuration you specified in the previous step. You will then be able to download the report detailing the findings.
The above setup gives you everything you need to get started but there is certainly room for improvement.
It is not always convenient to go to the Inspector dashboard itself to check for discovered vulnerabilities. Instead, I recommend creating an SNS Topic which will be notified if Inspector finds new weaknesses. You can go a step further and, in the true DevSecOps way, set up a Lambda function that will automatically remediate Inspector findings on your behalf and subscribe it to this topic. AWS kindly open sourced a Lambda job (Python script) that automatically patches EC2 instances when an Inspector assessment generates a CVE finding.
You can see how Lambda is doing its magic installing updates in the CloudWatch Logs:
Or you can connect to your EC2 instance directly and check yum logs:
You will see a number of packages updated automatically when the Lambda function is triggered based on the Inspector CVE findings. The actual list will of course depend on how many updates you are missing and will correspond to the CloudWatch logs.
You can run scans periodically and still choose to receive the notifications but the fact that security vulnerabilities are being discovered and remediated automatically, even as you sleep, should give you at least some peace of mind.
