Thinking Securely, in AWS.

Cybersecurity roles are expected to grow 750% in the next five years [1][2], now, if you are expecting that colleges, companies, and governments bridge the knowledge gap to fulfill those jobs, you’ve learned nothing from tech-history.

Those more than 5 million future jobs will be filled by high-driven individuals looking for a $99,730 yearly median-salary, in the US. [1][3]

But besides job stability and good earnings potential, there are plenty of good reasons to engage in a cyber-security related career:

• Work for a socially responsible organization: Companies that invest resources in cybersecurity are, potentially, better intentioned in protecting their customer’s interests, they care for the organization long-term sustainability, have a defined vision, follow superior ethical practices, and generally are nicer people to work with.
• Challenging projects and transferable skills: In the current tech innovation wave, the industries experiencing the highest growth are, unsurprisingly, the most regulated ones: Fin-Tech, Health Care, and shortly Government. Regulations involve meeting compliance requirements, auditing, and handling sensitive data, where the incentives for cyber-attacks are considerably larger. Curious individuals will like to learn that the strategies employed in one industry can be adapted to other industries, giving you great mobility and a variety of problems to work on.
• Ownership and control of your output: contrary to Software Development where development is usually driven by the market, managers, or users. Security is legislated and more often than not, logical, there is an established “right” way to operate, while still allowing plenty of creativity and innovation with a rapidly evolving scenery involving Machine Learning bots and tools to help manage and monitor cloud infrastructure.

The industries experiencing the highest growth are, unsurprisingly, the most regulated ones.

Photo by Kushagra Kevat on Unsplash

#cybersecurity #cloud-computing #aws #software-architecture #software-engineering

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Best Custom Web & Mobile App Development Company

Everything around us has become smart, like smart infrastructures, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, to name a few. The innovation of smart devices makes it possible to achieve these heights in science and technology. But, data is vulnerable, there is a risk of attack by cybercriminals. To get started, let’s know about IoT devices.

What are IoT devices?

The Internet Of Things(IoT) is a system that interrelates computer devices like sensors, software, and actuators, digital machines, etc. They are linked together with particular objects that work through the internet and transfer data over devices without humans interference.

Famous examples are Amazon Alexa, Apple SIRI, Interconnected baby monitors, video doorbells, and smart thermostats.

How could your IoT devices be vulnerable?

When technologies grow and evolve, risks are also on the high stakes. Ransomware attacks are on the continuous increase; securing data has become the top priority.

When you think your smart home won’t fudge a thing against cybercriminals, you should also know that they are vulnerable. When cybercriminals access our smart voice speakers like Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri, it becomes easy for them to steal your data.

Cybersecurity report 2020 says popular hacking forums expose 770 million email addresses and 21 million unique passwords, 620 million accounts have been compromised from 16 hacked websites.

The attacks are likely to increase every year. To help you secure your data of IoT devices, here are some best tips you can implement.

Tips to secure your IoT devices

1. Change Default Router Name

Your router has the default name of make and model. When we stick with the manufacturer name, attackers can quickly identify our make and model. So give the router name different from your addresses, without giving away personal information.

2. Know your connected network and connected devices

If your devices are connected to the internet, these connections are vulnerable to cyber attacks when your devices don’t have the proper security. Almost every web interface is equipped with multiple devices, so it’s hard to track the device. But, it’s crucial to stay aware of them.

3. Change default usernames and passwords

When we use the default usernames and passwords, it is attackable. Because the cybercriminals possibly know the default passwords come with IoT devices. So use strong passwords to access our IoT devices.

4. Manage strong, Unique passwords for your IoT devices and accounts

Use strong or unique passwords that are easily assumed, such as ‘123456’ or ‘password1234’ to protect your accounts. Give strong and complex passwords formed by combinations of alphabets, numeric, and not easily bypassed symbols.

Also, change passwords for multiple accounts and change them regularly to avoid attacks. We can also set several attempts to wrong passwords to set locking the account to safeguard from the hackers.

5. Do not use Public WI-FI Networks

Are you try to keep an eye on your IoT devices through your mobile devices in different locations. I recommend you not to use the public WI-FI network to access them. Because they are easily accessible through for everyone, you are still in a hurry to access, use VPN that gives them protection against cyber-attacks, giving them privacy and security features, for example, using Express VPN.

6. Establish firewalls to discover the vulnerabilities

There are software and firewalls like intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system in the market. This will be useful to screen and analyze the wire traffic of a network. You can identify the security weakness by the firewall scanners within the network structure. Use these firewalls to get rid of unwanted security issues and vulnerabilities.

7. Reconfigure your device settings

Every smart device comes with the insecure default settings, and sometimes we are not able to change these default settings configurations. These conditions need to be assessed and need to reconfigure the default settings.

8. Authenticate the IoT applications

Nowadays, every smart app offers authentication to secure the accounts. There are many types of authentication methods like single-factor authentication, two-step authentication, and multi-factor authentication. Use any one of these to send a one time password (OTP) to verify the user who logs in the smart device to keep our accounts from falling into the wrong hands.

9. Update the device software up to date

Every smart device manufacturer releases updates to fix bugs in their software. These security patches help us to improve our protection of the device. Also, update the software on the smartphone, which we are used to monitoring the IoT devices to avoid vulnerabilities.

10. Track the smartphones and keep them safe

When we connect the smart home to the smartphone and control them via smartphone, you need to keep them safe. If you miss the phone almost, every personal information is at risk to the cybercriminals. But sometimes it happens by accident, makes sure that you can clear all the data remotely.

However, securing smart devices is essential in the world of data. There are still cybercriminals bypassing the securities. So make sure to do the safety measures to avoid our accounts falling out into the wrong hands. I hope these steps will help you all to secure your IoT devices.

If you have any, feel free to share them in the comments! I’d love to know them.

Are you looking for more? Subscribe to weekly newsletters that can help your stay updated IoT application developments.

#iot #enterprise iot security #how iot can be used to enhance security #how to improve iot security #how to protect iot devices from hackers #how to secure iot devices #iot security #iot security devices #iot security offerings #iot security technologies iot security plus #iot vulnerable devices #risk based iot security program

50+ Useful Kubernetes Tools for 2020 - Part 2

Introduction

Last year, we provided a list of Kubernetes tools that proved so popular we have decided to curate another list of some useful additions for working with the platform—among which are many tools that we personally use here at Caylent. Check out the original tools list here in case you missed it.

According to a recent survey done by Stackrox, the dominance Kubernetes enjoys in the market continues to be reinforced, with 86% of respondents using it for container orchestration.

(State of Kubernetes and Container Security, 2020)

And as you can see below, more and more companies are jumping into containerization for their apps. If you’re among them, here are some tools to aid you going forward as Kubernetes continues its rapid growth.

(State of Kubernetes and Container Security, 2020)

#blog #tools #amazon elastic kubernetes service #application security #aws kms #botkube #caylent #cli #container monitoring #container orchestration tools #container security #containers #continuous delivery #continuous deployment #continuous integration #contour #developers #development #developments #draft #eksctl #firewall #gcp #github #harbor #helm #helm charts #helm-2to3 #helm-aws-secret-plugin #helm-docs #helm-operator-get-started #helm-secrets #iam #json #k-rail #k3s #k3sup #k8s #keel.sh #keycloak #kiali #kiam #klum #knative #krew #ksniff #kube #kube-prod-runtime #kube-ps1 #kube-scan #kube-state-metrics #kube2iam #kubeapps #kubebuilder #kubeconfig #kubectl #kubectl-aws-secrets #kubefwd #kubernetes #kubernetes command line tool #kubernetes configuration #kubernetes deployment #kubernetes in development #kubernetes in production #kubernetes ingress #kubernetes interfaces #kubernetes monitoring #kubernetes networking #kubernetes observability #kubernetes plugins #kubernetes secrets #kubernetes security #kubernetes security best practices #kubernetes security vendors #kubernetes service discovery #kubernetic #kubesec #kubeterminal #kubeval #kudo #kuma #microsoft azure key vault #mozilla sops #octant #octarine #open source #palo alto kubernetes security #permission-manager #pgp #rafay #rakess #rancher #rook #secrets operations #serverless function #service mesh #shell-operator #snyk #snyk container #sonobuoy #strongdm #tcpdump #tenkai #testing #tigera #tilt #vert.x #wireshark #yaml

9 AWS Security Best Practices: Securing Your AWS Cloud

Working with Amazon facilities, it is necessary to implement AWS security best practices to ensure the safety of the data and the cloud.

The digitalization drive has become the dominating trend, with computer technologies penetrating all spheres of social and personal life in the modern world. Alongside ushering innumerable benefits, the ubiquitous advent of IT devices has brought serious concerns in its wake. One of the most pressing questions that worries both individuals and organizations is, “How secure is my virtual data?”

Public anxiety is continuously fed by reports of security breaches and data leakages that cost companies a pretty penny. Their  financial losses manifest an ever-growing pattern, with businesses having to spend (or waste?) millions of dollars to redress gruesome consequences. For example, Desjardines Group lost over $50 million to cover for the data leakage of their clientele, and Norsk Hydro had to fork out $75 million to eliminate the effects of a cyberattack. Such exorbitant losses are rare, but  IBM experts believe that on average, corporate victims of cybercrime have to foot a bill equal to $4 million. Because of such appalling statistics, establishing cybersecurity of their IT environment is prioritized by many organizations. Even the malicious onslaught of the global pandemic didn’t relegate security considerations to a secondary place, with companies reluctant to cut down on the security strategy enforcement expenditures.

AWS Security Best Practices

Start With Planning

Know Thy Ground

Don’t Neglect Native Resources

Make Your Security Policy Comprehensive

Implement User Access Control

Define Password Policy

Make Data Encryption a Rule

Remember to Backup Your Data Regularly

Systematic Security Policies Updates and Open Access is a Must

#security #aws #serverless #cloud security #aws security

How to Use AWS IAM Role on AWS EKS PODs

A native-AWS way to attach an IAM role into the Kubernetes POD, without third-party software, reducing latency and improving your EKS security.

How It Works

It’s possible to attach an IAM role in a Kubernetes POD without using third-party software, such as kube2iam and kiam. This is thanks to the integration between AWS IAM and Kubernetes ServiceAccount, following the approach of IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA).

---

Benefits

There are quite a few benefits of using IRSA with Kubernetes PODs.

• Granular restriction (per cluster, per namespace, etc.).
• It’s also possible to not use it.
• More flexible than the other tools.
• One less point of failure (maybe a few less).
• Lesser resource consumption.
• More pods per node.
• Latency may reduce by ~50ms.
• Especially for the first request.
• Prevent issues with caching the credentials.
• This software takes a few minutes to update its cache.
• Better auditing.
• Instead of checking the logs of kube2iam/kiam pods, you can check AWS CloudTrails.
• Easier to set up.
• AWS provides full support.

---

Pre-requirements

There are a few pre-requirements that you’ll need to attempt in order to use the IAM role in a POD.

• An IAM OpenID Connect provider pointing to the AWS EKS OpenID Connect provider URL.
• AWS EKS cluster 1.13 or above.
• A trust relationship between your IAM Role and the OpenID Provider.

#cloud #tutorial #aws #kubernetes #cloud security #k8s #eks #aws security #kubernetes security #aws iam

AWS Cost Allocation Tags and Cost Reduction

Bob had just arrived in the office for his first day of work as the newly hired chief technical officer when he was called into a conference room by the president, Martha, who immediately introduced him to the head of accounting, Amanda. They exchanged pleasantries, and then Martha got right down to business:

“Bob, we have several teams here developing software applications on Amazon and our bill is very high. We think it’s unnecessarily high, and we’d like you to look into it and bring it under control.”

Martha placed a screenshot of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing report on the table and pointed to it.

“This is a problem for us: We don’t know what we’re spending this money on, and we need to see more detail.”

Amanda chimed in, “Bob, look, we have financial dimensions that we use for reporting purposes, and I can provide you with some guidance regarding some information we’d really like to see such that the reports that are ultimately produced mirror these dimensions — if you can do this, it would really help us internally.”

“Bob, we can’t stress how important this is right now. These projects are becoming very expensive for our business,” Martha reiterated.

“How many projects do we have?” Bob inquired.

“We have four projects in total: two in the aviation division and two in the energy division. If it matters, the aviation division has 75 developers and the energy division has 25 developers,” the CEO responded.

Bob understood the problem and responded, “I’ll see what I can do and have some ideas. I might not be able to give you retrospective insight, but going forward, we should be able to get a better idea of what’s going on and start to bring the cost down.”

The meeting ended with Bob heading to find his desk. Cost allocation tags should help us, he thought to himself as he looked for someone who might know where his office is.

#aws #aws cloud #node js #cost optimization #aws cli #well architected framework #aws cost report #cost control #aws cost #aws tags