Of CORS It Gets Better

• CanaryTokens: https://www.canarytokens.org/
• Found a solid way to avoid that sneaky method: https://blog.thinkst.com/2022/02/a-safety-net-for-aws-canarytokens.html?m=1
• The folks at Orca found a vulnerability around OCI’s handling of Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) Metadata: https://orca.security/resources/blog/Oracle-server-side-request-forgery-ssrf-attack-metadata/
• S3 Bucket Negligence Award: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/08/ottawa-trucker-freedom-convoy-exposed-donation/
• Only 22% of enterprise customers: https://therecord.media/microsoft-says-mfa-adoption-remains-low-only-22-among-enterprise-customers/
• Modified their hypervisor: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-cloud-hypervisor-modified-to-detect-cryptominers-without-agents/
• Amazon CloudTrail: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/
• Amazon API Gateway CORS Configurator: https://cors.serverlessland.com/

Transcript

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.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They’ve also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That’s S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.

Corey: So, last week was fairly tame and—no. I’m not going to say that because the last time I said that, all hell broke loose with Log4J and I can’t go through that again.

So, let’s see what happened last week in AWS Security. I like this one very much. Thinkst Canary provides, for free via CanaryTokens.org, an AWS credential generator that spits out IAM credentials with no permissions. The single thing they do is scream bloody murder if someone attempts to use them because those credentials have been stolen. There are some sneaky ways to avoid having the testing of those tokens show up in CloudTrail logs, but they’ve just found a solid way to avoid that sneaky method. It’s worth digging into.

I’ve been a fan of Oracle Cloud for a while, which has attracted some small amount of controversy. I stand by my opinion. That said, there’s been some debate over whether they’re a viable cloud provider at scale. There are certain things I look for as indicators that a cloud provider is a serious contender, and one of them has just been reached: the folks at Orca found a vulnerability around OCI’s handling of Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) Metadata. It sounds like I’m kidding here, but I’m not. When third-party researchers find a vulnerability that is non-obvious to most of us, that’s an indication that real companies are using services built on top of the platform. Onward.

A donation site raising funds for the Ottawa truckers’ convoy nonsense that’s been going on scored itself an S3 Bucket Negligence Award. No matter how much I may dislike an organization or its policies, I maintain that cybersecurity needs to be available to all.

Corey: You know the drill: you’re just barely falling asleep and you’re jolted awake by an emergency page. That’s right, it’s your night on call, and this is the bad kind of Call of Duty. The good news is, is that you’ve got New Relic, so you can quickly run down the incident checklist and find the problem. You have an errors inbox that tells you that Lambdas are good, RUM is good, but something’s up in APM. So, you click the error and find the deployment marker where it all began. Dig deeper, there’s another set of errors. What is it? Of course, it’s Kubernetes, starting after an update. You ask that team to roll back and bam, problem solved. That’s the value of combining 16 different monitoring products into a single platform: you can pinpoint issues down to the line of code quickly. That’s why the Dev and Ops teams at DoorDash, GitHub, Epic Games, and more than 14,000 other companies use New Relic. The next late-night call is just waiting to happen, so get New Relic before it starts. And you can get access to the whole New Relic platform at 100 gigabytes of data free, forever, with no credit card. Visit newrelic.com/morningbrief that’s newrelic.com/morningbrief.

I knew MFA adoption was struggling among consumers, but I was stunned by Microsoft’s statement that only 22% of enterprise customers have adopted an additional security factor. Please, if you haven’t enabled MFA in your important accounts—and yes, your cloud provider is one of those—please go ahead and do it now.

An interesting security advancement over in the land of Google Cloud, they’ve modified their hypervisor to detect cryptocurrency mining without needing an agent inside of the VM. This beats my usual method of ‘looking for instances with lots of CPU usage because most of the time the fleet is bored.’

Over in AWS-land, they didn’t have anything particularly noteworthy that came out last week for security, so I want to talk a little bit about a service that gets too little love: Amazon CloudTrail. Think of this as an audit log for all of the management events that happen in your AWS account. You’re going to want to secure where the logs live, ideally in another account for your AWS organization. To AWS’s credit, they made the first management trail free a few years ago and enabled it across all accounts by default as a result. This is going to help someone out there, I suspect. Remember, if you haven’t heard about it before, it’s new to you.

And I found a fun tool that’s just transformative because if the bully who beat you up and stole your lunch money in middle school were a technology, they would undoubtedly be CORS, or ‘Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.’ The Amazon API Gateway CORS Configurator tool helps you make it work with API Gateway, and I love this so much. And that’s what happened last week in AWS security. Thanks 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.

Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.