Security

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks provide a system hardening profile for servers and applications. What parts of the benchmark apply to containers? And how do we use them?

Core to any DevSecOps program is measurement and metrics. How many releases did we perform this week? How did that compare with last week? What was the lead time for changes? In this article I want to introduce a new metric for DevSecOps adoption, and how we can start to measure this throughout the cloud-native application lifecycle.

A deep dive into Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes (RHACS), Red Hat Security Advisories (RHSAs), and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). No mention of lions, tigers, or bears.

A couple of months ago I wrote an article on StackRox and another open source project, GTFOBins. The first article looked at identifying GTFOBins components during development, and this article looks at identifying GTFOBins execution inside containers at runtime.

The OpenShift release image is a critical component of the software supply-chain for OpenShift. In this article I want to take a closer look at the release image, and how it's verified.

A few weeks I wrote an article on 'Living off the Land' and containers. GTFOBins is an open source project tracking binaries that could be used to support a 'Living off the Land' strategy, and this article explores integrations with StackRox.

Sigstore and StackRox are open source projects helping to address security challenges. Sigstore looks at the software supply chain, and StackRox at Kubernetes-native security models - what do they look like together?

A recent Microsoft threat intelligence report called attention to "living off the land" techniques. I thought it would be interesting to see how containers and containerised applications inherently help to mitigate these techniques.

Sigstore is an open source project enabling anyone to sign and validate software releases, including container images. This article takes a closer look at Sigstore and some of the innovation happening around the project.

A recent FortiOS vulnerability is being actively exploited. Ansible can be used to implement a mitigation.

In the last article I looked at automating some of the tests available for Windows servers and desktops in the ACSC Essential Eight assessment guide. This article looks at how we can measure assessment activity - how often are we assessing systems, and are they passing the tests?

Recently the Australian Cyber Security Centre released an Essential Eight assessment guide. This article looks at automating some of the tests in the guide with Ansible.

Ansible provides a way to automate functional verification tests. This article looks at an improved approach to automating functional verification tests that I introduced in an earlier article.

Functional verification provides a way that we can attest to the configuration of a device or system, and verify compliance controls. This article looks at a functional verification approach using Ansible.

A quick look at the File Access Policy Analyzer, an open source tool simplifying application control implementation

RSA Conference 2022 again highlighted that many data breaches are due to unpatched systems. In this article I look at some of the technologies available to help organisations ensure that updates are applied across their hybrid cloud environments

Many organisations take the same approach to securing virtual machines, which I call 'Access & Agents'. While effective for virtual machines and other legacy infrastructure, this approach doesn't translate across to containers and Kubernetes, and this article looks at why.

Did you know that you can scan the internal OpenShift registry for security issues? Read on to find out how.

A quick guide on how to integrate a Kubernetes-native security platform with quay.io private repositories

Automation allows organisations to scale security workflows across hybrid cloud environments. In this article I take a closer look at automating application control, and how you can use Ansible roles to create reusable automation content.

What does it mean to be "Kubernetes-native"? And what does Kubernetes-native security look like?

Injecting integrity checks to application control processes is a winning security combination. Application control allows you to specify that only certain processes can execute on a system - but how do you know they are the right processes? How can you ensure that the code that you want to execute is the code that actually executes?

Application control seems to be one of those elusive security controls that organisations spend years chasing. How can we validate which processes are authorised to run on a system, and then enforce this?

Compliance evokes images of checking boxes. The real purpose of IT system compliance is risk migitation, and it probably just needs a better name