A Somehow Quiet Security Week

Corey: This is the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition. AWS is fond of saying security is job zero. That means it’s nobody in particular’s job, which means it falls to the rest of us. Just the news you need to know, none of the fluff.

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Corey: re:Invent has come and gone, and with it remarkably few security announcements. Shockingly, it was a slow week for the industry. I’m glad but also disappointed to be proven wrong in my, “The only thing you, as a company who isn’t AWS, should be announcing during re:Invent is your data breach since nobody will be paying attention,” snark. But it’s for the best. It means that maybe—maybe—we’re starting to see things normalize a bit.

Now, from the Community, we saw some interesting stuff. Scuttlebutt has it that cyber-security insurance providers are increasing their requirements to be insurable. This makes a lot of sense; as ransomware attacks become more numerous, nobody is going to want to cut large insurance checks to folks who didn’t think to have offline backups. You might want to check the specific terms and conditions of your policy.

I also liked a writeup as to “Why the C-suite doesn’t need access to all corporate data.” It’s true, but it’s super hard to defend against. When the CTO ‘requests’ access to the AWS root account, who’s likely to say no? If you’re going to push for proper separation of duties, either do it the right way or don’t even bother.

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Corey: And from AWS, there was really one glaring announcement that made me happy in the security context, and that was that “Amazon S3 Object Ownership can now disable access control lists to simplify access management for data in S3,” and it’s huge. S3 ACLs have been a pain in everyone’s side for years. Remember that S3 was the first AWS service to general availability, and a second in beta, after SQS. Meanwhile, IAM wasn’t released until 2010. “Ignore bucket ACLs so you don’t have to think about them” is a huge step towards normalizing security within AWS, specifically S3.

And from the community's tools—I guess it’s not a tool so much as it is a tip or I don’t even know how you would describe it but I love it because Scott Piper is doing the lord’s work by curating a list of cloud provider security mistakes. Lord knows that none of them are going to be showcasing their own failures, or—thankfully—those of their competition because I don’t want to get in the middle of that mudslinging prize. This is well worth checking out and taking a look at, particularly when one provider or another starts getting a little too full of themselves around what they’re doing in security. That’s what happened last week in AWS security. Thank you for listening.

Corey: Thank you for listening to the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition with the latest in AWS security that actually matters. Please follow AWS Morning Brief on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast—or wherever the hell it is you find the dulcet tones of my voice—and be sure to sign up for the Last Week in AWS newsletter at lastweekinaws.com.

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