The critical importance of ensuring that your cloud environments and clusters are suitably protected.

This blog underlines the need of securing cloud environments and provides methods for doing so, such as avoiding running containers as root, using credentials with the least amount of privilege possible, and tracking and monitoring a variety of the environment’s components.

The topic of safety and protection was a hot topic this past year. Over the course of the past few years, there has been a discernible uptick in the utilization of Kubernetes as well as cloud providers in general. This suggests that hackers are starting to target cloud infrastructures rather than ageing on-premise systems as their primary target. There were a lot of sessions devoted to talking about different measures that could be made to make the surroundings more secure. There were also demos of how certain vulnerabilities in older versions of Kubernetes allowed attackers to quickly gain access to your cluster and sessions, revealing how attackers have evolved new strategies to attack your cloud environments. These vulnerabilities allowed attackers to easily gain access to your cluster and sessions.

Ransomware attacks are being used by criminals, even in situations where databases or storage buckets, for example, have been compromised. However, attackers also take advantage of the features of the cloud that initially drew us to it, particularly the ease with which extra resources can be established. As a result of the ease with which attackers can construct cryptocurrency miners using these new resources, such as additional virtual computers or new pods on clusters that are capable of autoscaling, the return on their attacks will be greatly accelerated.

Does this suggest that you have to quit making use of environments that involve cloud computing? In no way, shape, or form. On the other hand, this does imply that you are responsible for ensuring that the workloads you store in the cloud have been adequately protected, which is accomplished in a manner that is distinct from that of on-premise storage.

Therefore, I have some really important advise for you to consider:

• The credentials with the least amount of privilege are constantly debated but rarely put into practise. Make it so an attacker may do as little as possible with compromised credentials by taking the appropriate precautions.
• In the case that a container is compromised, it is important to run containers under a user other than root in order to prevent an escalation in privilege.
• Never put too much stock in other sources, and always make sure to verify their claims. For instance, you should try to avoid using public container or machine images if it is practicable to do so, and you should always do security checks before executing such workloads.
• Keep a close eye on and record your surroundings from every angle in order to identify and document any strange activity.
• To protect yourself from security flaws, you should routinely update all of your software. While you wait for a solution, it is imperative that mitigation controls be put into place.
• Keep confidences in a safe place. Make sure that material that should be kept confidential is stored in areas that have stringent access controls.