Find, Fix and Eliminate Cloud Vulnerabilities with Shir Tamari and Company

Episode Summary

For this episode we’re changing it up a bit. Corey sits down for a group chat with Shir Tamari, Head of Research at Wiz, and a couple of his esteemed colleagues; Nir Ohfield and Sagi Tzadik. While the structure is a tad different, the content is a frequent subject: security! Shir and his team of specialists at Wiz are making some serious research into cyber security, and in turn are developing some excellent insights. Shir, Nir, and Sagi reveal some of the cutting edge security research that they have been conducting. They’ve honed their research intent down to two primary responsibilities: find risks in cloud environments, and doing community research. Shir and co. break down the various vulnerabilities that their research has revealed, and the methods they’re developing to alleviate these multifarious risks.

Episode Show Notes & Transcript

About Shir
Shir Tamari is the Head of Research of Wiz, the cloud security company. He is an experienced security and technology researcher specializing in vulnerability research and practical hacking. In the past, he served as a consultant to a variety of security companies in the fields of research, development and product.

About Sagi
Sagi Tzadik is a security researcher in the Wiz Research Team. Sagi specializes in research and exploitation of web applications vulnerabilities, as well as network security and protocols. He is also a Game-Hacking and Reverse-Engineering enthusiast.

About Nir
Nir Ohfeld is a security researcher from Israel. Nir currently does cloud-related security research at Wiz. Nir specializes in the exploitation of web applications, application security and in finding vulnerabilities in complex high-level systems.

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Transcript
Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.


Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you’re tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you’re using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  


Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn’t heard of before, but they’re doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they’re using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they’re able to wind up taking what you’re running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I’m somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that’s one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer’s problem and they get out there in public and say, “We’re solving a problem,” it’s very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it’s worth exploring. So, if you’re looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That’s risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.


Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn. One of the joyful parts of working with cloud computing is that you get to put a whole lot of things you don’t want to deal with onto the shoulders of the cloud provider you’re doing business with—or cloud providers as the case may be, if you fallen down the multi-cloud well. One of those things is often significant aspects of security. And that’s great, right, until it isn’t. Today, I’m joined by not one guest, but rather three coming to us from Wiz, which I originally started off believing was, oh, it’s a small cybersecurity research group. But they’re far more than that. Thank you for joining me, and could you please introduce yourself?


Shir: Yes, thank you, Corey. My name is Shir, Shir Tamari. I lead the security research team at Wiz. I working in the company for the past year. I’m working with these two nice teammates.


Nir: Hi, my name is Nir Ohfield,. I’m a security researcher at the Wiz research team. I’ve also been working for the Wiz research team for the last year. And yeah.


Sagi: I’m Sagi, Sagi Tzadik. I also work for the Wiz research team for the last six months.


Corey: I want to thank you for joining me. You folks really burst onto the scene earlier this year, when I suddenly started seeing your name come up an awful lot. And it brought me back to my childhood where there was an electronics store called Nobody Beats the Wiz. It was more or less a version of Fry’s on a different coast, and they went out of business and oh, good. We’re going back in time. And suddenly it felt like I was going back in time in a different light because you had a number of high profile vulnerabilities that you had discovered, specifically in the realm of Microsoft Azure. The two that leap to mind the most readily for me are ChaosDB and the OMIGOD exploits. There was a third as well, but why don’t you tell me, in your own words, what it is that you discovered and how that played out?


Shir: We, sort of, found the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure. We did report multiple vulnerabilities also in GCP, and AWS. We had multiple vulnerabilities in AWS [unintelligible 00:02:42] cross-account. It was a cross-account access to other tenants; it just was much less severe than the ChaosDB vulnerability that we will speak on more later. And a both we’ve present in Blackhat in Vegas in [unintelligible 00:02:56]. So, we do a lot of research. You mentioned that we have a third one. Which one did you refer to?


Corey: That’s a good question because you had the I want to say it was called as Azurescape, and you’re doing a fantastic job with branding a number of your different vulnerabilities, but there’s also, once you started reporting this, a lot of other research started coming out as well from other folks. And I confess, a lot of it sort of flowed together and been very hard to disambiguate, is this a systemic problem; is this, effectively, a whole bunch of people piling on now that their attention is being drawn somewhere; or something else? Because you’ve come out with an awful lot of research in a short period of time.


Shir: Yeah, we had a lot of good research in the past year. It’s a [unintelligible 00:03:36] mention Azurecape was actually found by a very good researcher in Palo Also. And… do you remember his name?


Sagi: No, I can’t recall his name is.


Corey: Yeah, they came out of unit 42 as I recall, their cybersecurity division. Every tech company out there seems to have some sort of security research division these days. What I think is, sort of, interesting is that to my understanding, you were founded, first and foremost, as a security company. You’re not doing this as an ancillary to selling something else like a firewall, or, effectively, you’re an ad comp—an ad tech company like Google, we you’re launching Project Zero. You are first and foremost aimed at this type of problem.


Shir: Yes. Wiz is not just a small research company. It’s actually pretty big company with over 200 employees. And the purpose of this product is a cloud security suite that provides [unintelligible 00:04:26] scanning capabilities in order to find risks in cloud environments. And the research team is a very small group. We are [unintelligible 00:04:35] researchers.


We have multiple responsibilities. Our first responsibility is to find risks in cloud environments: It could be misconfigurations, it could be vulnerabilities in libraries, in software, and we add those findings and the patterns we discover to the product in order to protect our customers, and to allow them for new risks. Our second responsibility is also to do a community research where we research everyone vulnerabilities in public products and cloud providers, and we share our findings with the cloud providers, then also with the community to make the cloud more secure.


Corey: I can’t shake the feeling that if there weren’t folks doing this sort of research and shining a light on what it is that the cloud providers are doing, if they were to discover these things at all, they would very quietly, effectively, fix it in the background and never breathe a word of it in public. I like the approach that you’re taking as far as dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the daylight, but I also have to imagine that probably doesn’t win you a whole lot of friends at the company that you’re focusing on at any given point in time. Because whenever you talk to a company about a security issue, it seems like the first thing they’re concerned about is, “Okay, how do we wind up spinning this or making sure that we minimize the reputational damage?” And then there’s a secondary reaction of, “Oh, and how do we protect our customers? But mostly, how do we avoid looking bad as a result?” And I feel like that’s an artifact of corporate culture these days. But it feels like the relationship has got to be somewhat interesting to navigate from your perspective.


Shir: So, once we found a vulnerability and we discuss it with the vendor, okay, first, I will mention that most cloud providers have a bug bounty program where they encourage researchers to find vulnerabilities and to discover new security threats. And all of them, as a public disclosure, [unintelligible 00:06:29] program will researchers are welcome and get safe harbor, you know, where the disclosure vulnerabilities. And I think it’s, like, common interest, both for customers, but for researchers, and the cloud providers to know about those vulnerabilities, to mitigate it down. And we do believe that sometimes cloud providors does resolve and mitigate vulnerabilities behind the scenes, and we know—we don’t know for sure, but—I don’t know about everything, but just by the vulnerabilities that we find, we assume that there is much more of them that we never heard about. And this is something that we believe needs to be changed in the industry.


Cloud providers should be more transparent, they should show more information about the result vulnerabilities. Definitely when a customer data was accessible, or where it was at risk, or at possible risk. And this is actually—it’s something that we actually trying to change in the industry. We have a community and, like, innovative community. It’s like an initiative that we try to collect, we opened a Slack channel called the Cloud CVE, and we try to invite as much people as we can that concern about cloud’s vulnerabilities, in order to make a change in the industry, and to assist cloud providers, or to convince cloud providers to be more transparent, to enumerate cloud vulnerabilities so they have an identifier just, like cloud CVE, like a CVE, and to make the cloud more protected and more transparent customers.


Corey: The thing that really took me aback by so much of what you found is that we’ve become relatively accustomed to a few patterns over the past 15 to 20 years. For example, we’re used to, “Oh, this piece of software you run on your desktop has a horrible flaw. Great.” Or this thing you run in your data center, same story; patch, patch, patch, patch patch. That’s great.


But there was always the sense that these were the sorts of things that were sort of normal, but the cloud providers were on top of things, where they were effectively living up to their side of the shared responsibility bargain. And that whenever you wound up getting breached, for whatever reason—like in the AWS world, where oh, you wound up losing a bunch of customer data because you had an open S3 bucket? Well, yeah, that’s not really something you can hang super effectively around the neck of the cloud provider, given that you’re the one that misconfigured that. But what was so striking about what you found with both of the vulnerabilities that we’re talking about today, the customer could have done everything absolutely correctly from the beginning and still had their data exposed. And that feels like it’s something relatively new in the world of cloud service providers.


Is this something that’s been going on for a while and we’re just now shining a light on it? Have I just missed a bunch of interesting news stories where the clouds have—“Oh, yeah, by the way, people, we periodically have to go in and drag people out of our cloud control plane because oops-a-doozy, someone got in there again with the squirrels,” or is this something that is new?


Shir: So, we do see an history other cases where probability [unintelligible 00:09:31] has disclosed vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure itself. There was only few, and usually, it was—the research was conducted by independent researchers. And I don’t think it had such an impact, like ChaosDB, which allowed [cross-system 00:09:51] access to databases of other customers, which was a huge case. And so if it wasn’t a big story, so most people will not hear about it. And also, independent researchers usually don’t have the back that we have here in Wiz.


We have a funding, we have the marketing division that help us to get coverage with reporters, who make sure to make—if it’s a big story, we make sure that other people will hear about it. And I believe that in most bug bounty programs where independent researchers find vulnerabilities, usually they more care about the bounty than the aftereffect of stopping the vulnerability, sharing it with the community. Usually also, independent [unintelligible 00:10:32] usually share the findings with the research community. And the research community is relatively small to the IT community. So, it is new, but it’s not that new.


There was some events back in history, [unintelligible 00:10:46] similar vulnerabilities. So, I think that one of the points here is that everyone makes a mistake. You can find bugs which affected mostly, as you mentioned previously, this software that you installed on your desktop has bugs and you need to patch it, but in the case of cloud providers, when they make mistakes, when they introduce bugs to the service, it affects all of their customers. And this is something that we should think about. So, mistakes that are being made by cloud providers have a lot of impact regarding their customers.


Corey: Yeah. It’s not a story of you misconfigured, your company’s SAN, so you’re the one that was responsible for a data breach. It’s suddenly, you’re misconfiguring everyone’s SAN simultaneously. It’s the sheer scale and scope of what it is that they’ve done. And—


Shir: Yeah, exactly.


Corey: —I’m definitely on board with that. But the stuff I’ve seen in the past, from cloud providers—AWS, primarily, since that is admittedly where I tend to focus most of my time and energy—has been privilege escalation style stuff, where, okay, if you assign some users at your company—or wherever—access to this managed IAM policy, well, they’ll have suddenly have access to things that go beyond the scope of that. And that’s not good, let’s be very clear on that, but it is a bit different between that and oh, by the way, suddenly, someone in another company that has no relationship established with you at all can suddenly rummage through your data that you’re storing in Cosmos DB, their managed database offering. That’s the thing to me that I think was the big head-turning aspect of this, not just for me, but for a number of folks I’ve spoken to, in financial services, in government, in a bunch of environments where data privacy is not optional in the same way that it is when, you know, you’re running a social media for pets app.


Nir: [laugh]. Yeah, but the thing is, that until the publication of ChaosDB, no one ever heard about the [unintelligible 00:12:40] data tampering in any cloud providers. Meaning maybe in six months, you can see a similar vulnerabilities in other cloud providers that maybe other security research groups find. So yeah, so Azure was maybe the first, but we don’t think they will be the last.


Shir: Yes. And also, when we do the community research, it is very important to us to take big targets. We enjoy the research. One day, the research will be challenging and we want to do something that it was new and great, so we always put a very big targets. To actually find vulnerability in the infrastructure of the cloud provider, it was very challenging for us.


When didn’t came ChaosDB by that; we actually found it by mistake. But now we think actively that this is our next goal is to find vulnerabilities in the infrastructure and not just vulnerabilities that affect only the—vulnerabilities within the account itself, like [unintelligible 00:13:32] or bad scoped policies that affects only one account.


Corey: That seems to be the transformative angle that you don’t see nearly as much in existing studies around vulnerabilities in this space. It’s always the, “Oh, no. We could have gotten breached by those people across the hallway from us in our company,” as opposed to folks on the other side of the planet. And that is, I guess, sort of the scary thing. What has also been interesting to me, and you obviously have more experience with this than I do, but I have a hard time envisioning that, for example, AWS, having a vulnerability like this and not immediately swinging into disaster firefighting mode, sending their security execs on a six month speaking tour to explain what happened, how it got there, all of the steps that they’re taking to remediate this, but Azure published a blog post explaining this in relatively minor detail: Here are the mitigations you need to take, and as far as I can tell, then they sort of washed their hands of the whole thing and have enthusiastically begun saying absolutely nothing since.


And that I have learned is sort of fairly typical for Microsoft, and has been for a while, where they just don’t talk about these things when it arises. Does that match your experience? Is this something that you find that is common when a large company winds up being, effectively, embarrassed about their security architecture, or is this something that is unique to Microsoft tends to approach these things?


Shir: I would say in general, we really like the Microsoft MSRC team. The group in Microsoft that’s responsible for handling vulnerabilities, and I think it’s like the security division inside Microsoft, MSRC. So, we have a really good relationship and we had really good time working with them. They’re real professionals, they take our findings very seriously. I can tell that in the ChaosDB incident, they didn’t plan to publish a blog post, and they did that after the story got a lot of attention.


So, I’m looking at a PR team, and I have no idea out there decide stuff and what is their strategy, but as I mentioned earlier, we believe that there is much more cloud vulnerabilities that we never heard of, and it should change; they should publish more.


Nir: It’s also worth mentioning that Microsoft acted really quick on this vulnerability and took it very seriously. They issued the fix in less than 48 hours. They were very transparent in the entire procedure, and we had multiple teams meeting with them. The entire experience was pretty positive with each of the vulnerability we’ve ever reported to Microsoft.


Sagi: So, it’s really nice working with the guys that are responsible for security, but regarding PR, I agree that they should have posted more information regarding this incident.


Corey: The thing that I found interesting about this, and I’ve seen aspects of it before, but never this strongly is, I was watching for, I guess, what I would call just general shittiness, for lack of a better term, from the other providers doing a happy dance of, “Aha, we’re better than you are,” and I saw none of that. Because when I started talking to people in some depth at this at other companies, the immediate response—not just AWS, to be clear—has been no, no, you have to understand, this is not good for anyone because this effectively winds up giving fuel to the slow-burning fire of folks who are pulling the, “See, I told you the cloud wasn’t secure.” And now the enterprise groundhog sees that shadow and we get six more years of building data centers instead of going to the cloud. So, there’s no one in the cloud space who’s happy with this kind of revelation and this type of vulnerability. My question for you is given that you are security researchers, which means you are generally cynical and pessimistic about almost everything technological, if you’re like most of the folks in that space that I’ve spent time with, is going with cloud the wrong answer? Should people be building their own data centers out? Should they continue to be going on this full cloud direction? I mean, what can they do if everything’s on fire and terrible all the time?


Shir: So, I think that there is a trade-off when you embrace the cloud. On one hand, you get the fastest deployment times, and a good scalability regarding your infrastructure, but on the other end, when there is a security vulnerability in the cloud provider, you are immediately affected. But it is worth mentioning that the security teams or the cloud providers are doing extremely good job. Most likely, they are going to patch the vulnerability faster than it would have been patched in on-premise environment. And it’s good that you have them working for you.


And once the vulnerability is mitigated—depends on the vulnerability but in the case of ChaosDB—when the vulnerability was mitigated on Microsoft’s end, and it was mitigated completely. No one else could have exploited after the mitigated it once. Yes, it’s also good to mention that the cloud provides organization and companies a lot of security features, [unintelligible 00:18:34] I want to say security features, I would say, it provides a lot of tooling that helps security. The option to have one interface, like one API to control all of my devices, to get visibility to all of my servers, to enforce policies very easily, it’s much more secure than on-premise environments, where there is usually a big mess, a lot of vendors.


Because the power was in the on-prem, the power was on the user, so the user had a lot of options. Usually used many types of software, many types of hardware, it’s really hard to mitigate the software vulnerability in on-prem environments. It’s really helped to get the visibility. And the cloud provides a lot of security, like, a good aspects, and in my opinion, moving to the cloud for most organization would be a more secure choice than remain on-premise, unless you have a very, very small on-prem environment.


Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don’t ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.


Corey: The challenge I keep running into is that—and this is sort of probably the worst of all possible reasons to go with cloud, but let’s face it, when us-east-1 recently took an outage and basically broke a decent swath of the internet, a lot of companies were impacted, but they didn’t see their names in the headlines; it was all about Amazon’s outage. There’s a certain value when a cloud provider takes an outage or a security breach, that the headlines screaming about it are about the provider, not about you and your company as a customer of that provider. Is that something that you’re seeing manifest across the industry? Is that an unhealthy way to think about it? Because it feels almost like it’s cheating in a way. It’s, “Yeah, we had a security problem, but so did the entire internet, so it’s okay.”


Nir: So, I think that if there would be evidence that these kind of vulnerabilities were exploited while disclosure, then you wouldn’t see headlines of companies, shouting in the headlines. But in the case of the us reporting the vulnerabilities prior to anyone exploiting them, results in nowhere a company showing up in the headlines. I think it’s a slightly different situation than an outage.


Shir: Yeah, but also, when one big provider have an outage or a breach, so usually, the customers will think it’s out of my responsibility. I mean, it’s bad; my data has been leaked, but what can I do? I think it’s very easy for most people to forgive companies [unintelligible 00:21:11]. I mean, you know what, it’s just not my area. So, maybe I’m not answer that into that. [laugh].


Corey: No, no, it’s very fair. The challenge I have, as a customer of all of these providers, to be honest, is that a lot of the ways that the breach investigations are worded of, “We have seen no evidence that this has been exploited.” Okay, that simultaneously covers the two very different use cases of, “We have pored through our exhaustive audit logs and validated that no one has done this particular thing in this particular way,” but it also covers the use case, “Of, hey, we learned we should probably be logging things, but we have no evidence that anything was exploited.” Having worked with these providers at scale, my gut impression is that they do in fact, have fairly detailed logs of who’s doing what and where. Would you agree with that assessment, or do you find that you tend to encounter logging and analysis gaps as you find these exploits?


Shir: We don’t really know. Usually when—I mean, ChaosDB scenario, we got access to a Jupyter Notebook. And from the Jupyter Notebook, we continued to another internal services. And we—nobody stopped us. Nobody—we expected an email, like—


Corey: “Whatcha doing over there, buddy?”


Shir: Yeah. “Please stop doing that, and we’re investigating you.” And we didn’t get any. And also, we don’t really know if they monitor it or not. I can tell from my technical background that logging so many environments, it’s hard.


And when you do decide to log all these events, you need to decide what to log. For example, if I have a database, a managed database, do I log all the queries that customers run? It’s too much. If I have an HTTP application—a managed HTTP application—do I save all the access logs, like all the requests? And if so, what will be the retention time? For how long?


We believe that it’s very challenging on the cloud provider side, but it just an assumption. And doing the discussion with Microsoft, the didn’t disclose any, like, scenarios they had with logging. They do mention that they’re [unintelligible 00:23:26] viewing the logs and searching to see if someone exploited this vulnerability before we disclosed it. Maybe someone discovered before we did. But they told us they didn’t find anything.


Corey: One last area I’d love to discuss with you before we call it an episode is that it’s easy to view Wiz through the lens of, “Oh, we just go out and find vulnerabilities here and there, and we make companies feel embarrassed—rightfully so—for the things that they do.” But a little digging shows that you’ve been around for a little over a year as a publicly known entity, and during that time, you’ve raised $600 million in funding, which is basically like what in the world is your pitch deck where you show up to investors and your slides are just, like, copies of their emails, and you read them to them?


[laugh]


I mean, on some level, it seems like that is a… as-, astounding amount of money to raise in a short period of time. But I’ve also done a little bit of digging, and to be clear, I do not believe that you have an extortion-based business model, which is a good thing. You’re building something very interesting that does in-depth analysis of cloud workloads, and I think it’s got an awful lot of promise. How does the vulnerability research that you do tie into that larger platform, other than, let’s be honest, some spectacularly effective marketing.


Sagi: Specifically in the ChaosDB vulnerability, we were actually not looking for a vulnerability in the cloud service providers. We were originally looking for common misconfigurations that our customers can make when they set up their Cosmos DB accounts, so that our product will be able to alert our customers regarding such misconfigurations. And then we went to the Azure portal and started to enable all of the features that Cosmos DB has to offer, and when we enabled enough features, we noticed some feature that could be vulnerable, and we started digging into it. And we ended up finding ChaosDB.


But our original work was to try and find misconfigurations that our customers can make in order to protect them and not to find a vulnerability in the [CSP 00:25:31]. This was just, like, a byproduct of this research.


Shir: Yes. There is, as I mentioned earlier, our main responsibility is to add a little security rist content to the product, to help customers to find new security risks in their environment. As you mentioned, like, the escalation possibilities within cloud accounts, and bad scoped policies, and many other security risks that are in the cloud area. And also, we are a very small team inside a big company, so most of the company, they are doing heavy [unintelligible 00:26:06] and talk with customers, they understand the risks, they understand the market, what the needs for tomorrow, and maybe we are well known for our vulnerabilities, but it just a very small part of the company.


Corey: On some level, it says wonderful things about your product, and also terrifying things from different perspectives of, “Oh, yeah, we found one of the worst cloud breaches in years by accident,” as opposed to actively going in trying to find the thing that has basically put you on the global map of awareness around these things. Because there a lot of security companies out there doing different things. In fact, go to RSA, and you’ll see basically 12 companies that just repeated over and over and over with different names and different brandings, and they’re all selling some kind of firewall. This is something actively different because everyone can tell beautiful pictures with slides and whatnot, and the corporate buzzwords. You’re one of those companies that actually did something meaningful, and it felt almost like a proof of concept. On some level, the fact that you weren’t actively looking for it is kind of an amazing testament for the product itself.


Shir: Yeah. We actually used the product in the beginning, in order to overview our own environment, and what is the most common services we use. In order—and we usually we mix this information with our product managers, know to understand what customers use and what products and services we need to research in order to bring value to the product.


Sagi: Yeah, so the reason we chose to research Cosmos DB was that, we found that a lot of our Azure customers are using Cosmos DB on their production environments, and we wanted to add mitigations for common misconfigurations to our product in order to protect our customers.


Nir: Yeah, the same goes with our other research, like OMIGOD, where we’ve seen that there is a excessive amount of [unintelligible 00:27:56] installations in an Azure environment, and it raised our [laugh] it raised our attention, and then found this vulnerability. It’s mostly, like, popularity-guided research. [laugh].


Shir: Yeah. And also [unintelligible 00:28:11] mention that maybe we find vulnerabilities by accident, but the service, we are doing vulnerability itself for the past ten years, and even more. So, we are very professional and this is what we do, and this is what we like to do. And we came skilled to the [crosstalk 00:28:25].


Corey: It really is neat to see, just because every other security tool that I’ve looked at in recent memory tells you the same stuff. It’s the same problem you see in the AWS billing space that I live in. Everyone says, “Oh, we can find these inactive instances that could be right-sized.” Great, because everyone’s dealing with the same data. It’s the security stuff is no different. “Hey, this S3 bucket is open.” Yes, it’s a public web server. Please stop waking me up at two in the morning about it. It’s there by design.


But it goes back and forth with the same stuff just presented differently. This is one of the first truly novel things I’ve seen in ages. If nothing else, you convince me to kick the tires on it, and see what kind of horrifying things I can learn about my own environments with it.


Shir: Yeah, you should. [laugh]. Let’s poke [unintelligible 00:29:13].


[laugh].


Corey: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about the research you’re up to and the things that you find interesting, where can they find you all?


Shir: Most of our publication—I mean, all of our publications are under the Wiz, which is wiz.io/blog, and people can read all of our research. Just today we are announcing a new one, so feel free to go and read there. And they also feel free to approach us on Twitter, the service, we have a Twitter account. We are open for, like, messages. Just send us a message.


Corey: And we will certainly put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:29:49]. Shir, Sagi, Nir, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.


Shir: Thank you.


Sagi: Thank you.


Nir: Thank you much.


Shir: It was very fun. Yeah.


Corey: This has been Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and thank you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, 
please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry insulting comment from someone else’s account.


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Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you’re tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you’re using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn’t heard of before, but they’re doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they’re using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they’re able to wind up taking what you’re running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I’m somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that’s one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer’s problem and they get out there in public and say, “We’re solving a problem,” it’s very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it’s worth exploring. So, if you’re looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That’s risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn. One of the joyful parts of working with cloud computing is that you get to put a whole lot of things you don’t want to deal with onto the shoulders of the cloud provider you’re doing business with—or cloud providers as the case may be, if you fallen down the multi-cloud well. One of those things is often significant aspects of security. And that’s great, right, until it isn’t. Today, I’m joined by not one guest, but rather three coming to us from Wiz, which I originally started off believing was, oh, it’s a small cybersecurity research group. But they’re far more than that. Thank you for joining me, and could you please introduce yourself?

Shir: Yes, thank you, Corey. My name is Shir, Shir Tamari. I lead the security research team at Wiz. I working in the company for the past year. I’m working with these two nice teammates.

Nir: Hi, my name is Nir Ohfield,. I’m a security researcher at the Wiz research team. I’ve also been working for the Wiz research team for the last year. And yeah.

Sagi: I’m Sagi, Sagi Tzadik. I also work for the Wiz research team for the last six months.

Corey: I want to thank you for joining me. You folks really burst onto the scene earlier this year, when I suddenly started seeing your name come up an awful lot. And it brought me back to my childhood where there was an electronics store called Nobody Beats the Wiz. It was more or less a version of Fry’s on a different coast, and they went out of business and oh, good. We’re going back in time. And suddenly it felt like I was going back in time in a different light because you had a number of high profile vulnerabilities that you had discovered, specifically in the realm of Microsoft Azure. The two that leap to mind the most readily for me are ChaosDB and the OMIGOD exploits. There was a third as well, but why don’t you tell me, in your own words, what it is that you discovered and how that played out?

Shir: We, sort of, found the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure. We did report multiple vulnerabilities also in GCP, and AWS. We had multiple vulnerabilities in AWS [unintelligible 00:02:42] cross-account. It was a cross-account access to other tenants; it just was much less severe than the ChaosDB vulnerability that we will speak on more later. And a both we’ve present in Blackhat in Vegas in [unintelligible 00:02:56]. So, we do a lot of research. You mentioned that we have a third one. Which one did you refer to?

Corey: That’s a good question because you had the I want to say it was called as Azurescape, and you’re doing a fantastic job with branding a number of your different vulnerabilities, but there’s also, once you started reporting this, a lot of other research started coming out as well from other folks. And I confess, a lot of it sort of flowed together and been very hard to disambiguate, is this a systemic problem; is this, effectively, a whole bunch of people piling on now that their attention is being drawn somewhere; or something else? Because you’ve come out with an awful lot of research in a short period of time.

Shir: Yeah, we had a lot of good research in the past year. It’s a [unintelligible 00:03:36] mention Azurecape was actually found by a very good researcher in Palo Also. And… do you remember his name?

Sagi: No, I can’t recall his name is.

Corey: Yeah, they came out of unit 42 as I recall, their cybersecurity division. Every tech company out there seems to have some sort of security research division these days. What I think is, sort of, interesting is that to my understanding, you were founded, first and foremost, as a security company. You’re not doing this as an ancillary to selling something else like a firewall, or, effectively, you’re an ad comp—an ad tech company like Google, we you’re launching Project Zero. You are first and foremost aimed at this type of problem.

Shir: Yes. Wiz is not just a small research company. It’s actually pretty big company with over 200 employees. And the purpose of this product is a cloud security suite that provides [unintelligible 00:04:26] scanning capabilities in order to find risks in cloud environments. And the research team is a very small group. We are [unintelligible 00:04:35] researchers.

We have multiple responsibilities. Our first responsibility is to find risks in cloud environments: It could be misconfigurations, it could be vulnerabilities in libraries, in software, and we add those findings and the patterns we discover to the product in order to protect our customers, and to allow them for new risks. Our second responsibility is also to do a community research where we research everyone vulnerabilities in public products and cloud providers, and we share our findings with the cloud providers, then also with the community to make the cloud more secure.

Corey: I can’t shake the feeling that if there weren’t folks doing this sort of research and shining a light on what it is that the cloud providers are doing, if they were to discover these things at all, they would very quietly, effectively, fix it in the background and never breathe a word of it in public. I like the approach that you’re taking as far as dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the daylight, but I also have to imagine that probably doesn’t win you a whole lot of friends at the company that you’re focusing on at any given point in time. Because whenever you talk to a company about a security issue, it seems like the first thing they’re concerned about is, “Okay, how do we wind up spinning this or making sure that we minimize the reputational damage?” And then there’s a secondary reaction of, “Oh, and how do we protect our customers? But mostly, how do we avoid looking bad as a result?” And I feel like that’s an artifact of corporate culture these days. But it feels like the relationship has got to be somewhat interesting to navigate from your perspective.

Shir: So, once we found a vulnerability and we discuss it with the vendor, okay, first, I will mention that most cloud providers have a bug bounty program where they encourage researchers to find vulnerabilities and to discover new security threats. And all of them, as a public disclosure, [unintelligible 00:06:29] program will researchers are welcome and get safe harbor, you know, where the disclosure vulnerabilities. And I think it’s, like, common interest, both for customers, but for researchers, and the cloud providers to know about those vulnerabilities, to mitigate it down. And we do believe that sometimes cloud providors does resolve and mitigate vulnerabilities behind the scenes, and we know—we don’t know for sure, but—I don’t know about everything, but just by the vulnerabilities that we find, we assume that there is much more of them that we never heard about. And this is something that we believe needs to be changed in the industry.

Cloud providers should be more transparent, they should show more information about the result vulnerabilities. Definitely when a customer data was accessible, or where it was at risk, or at possible risk. And this is actually—it’s something that we actually trying to change in the industry. We have a community and, like, innovative community. It’s like an initiative that we try to collect, we opened a Slack channel called the Cloud CVE, and we try to invite as much people as we can that concern about cloud’s vulnerabilities, in order to make a change in the industry, and to assist cloud providers, or to convince cloud providers to be more transparent, to enumerate cloud vulnerabilities so they have an identifier just, like cloud CVE, like a CVE, and to make the cloud more protected and more transparent customers.

Corey: The thing that really took me aback by so much of what you found is that we’ve become relatively accustomed to a few patterns over the past 15 to 20 years. For example, we’re used to, “Oh, this piece of software you run on your desktop has a horrible flaw. Great.” Or this thing you run in your data center, same story; patch, patch, patch, patch patch. That’s great.

But there was always the sense that these were the sorts of things that were sort of normal, but the cloud providers were on top of things, where they were effectively living up to their side of the shared responsibility bargain. And that whenever you wound up getting breached, for whatever reason—like in the AWS world, where oh, you wound up losing a bunch of customer data because you had an open S3 bucket? Well, yeah, that’s not really something you can hang super effectively around the neck of the cloud provider, given that you’re the one that misconfigured that. But what was so striking about what you found with both of the vulnerabilities that we’re talking about today, the customer could have done everything absolutely correctly from the beginning and still had their data exposed. And that feels like it’s something relatively new in the world of cloud service providers.

Is this something that’s been going on for a while and we’re just now shining a light on it? Have I just missed a bunch of interesting news stories where the clouds have—“Oh, yeah, by the way, people, we periodically have to go in and drag people out of our cloud control plane because oops-a-doozy, someone got in there again with the squirrels,” or is this something that is new?

Shir: So, we do see an history other cases where probability [unintelligible 00:09:31] has disclosed vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure itself. There was only few, and usually, it was—the research was conducted by independent researchers. And I don’t think it had such an impact, like ChaosDB, which allowed [cross-system 00:09:51] access to databases of other customers, which was a huge case. And so if it wasn’t a big story, so most people will not hear about it. And also, independent researchers usually don’t have the back that we have here in Wiz.

We have a funding, we have the marketing division that help us to get coverage with reporters, who make sure to make—if it’s a big story, we make sure that other people will hear about it. And I believe that in most bug bounty programs where independent researchers find vulnerabilities, usually they more care about the bounty than the aftereffect of stopping the vulnerability, sharing it with the community. Usually also, independent [unintelligible 00:10:32] usually share the findings with the research community. And the research community is relatively small to the IT community. So, it is new, but it’s not that new.

There was some events back in history, [unintelligible 00:10:46] similar vulnerabilities. So, I think that one of the points here is that everyone makes a mistake. You can find bugs which affected mostly, as you mentioned previously, this software that you installed on your desktop has bugs and you need to patch it, but in the case of cloud providers, when they make mistakes, when they introduce bugs to the service, it affects all of their customers. And this is something that we should think about. So, mistakes that are being made by cloud providers have a lot of impact regarding their customers.

Corey: Yeah. It’s not a story of you misconfigured, your company’s SAN, so you’re the one that was responsible for a data breach. It’s suddenly, you’re misconfiguring everyone’s SAN simultaneously. It’s the sheer scale and scope of what it is that they’ve done. And—

Shir: Yeah, exactly.

Corey: —I’m definitely on board with that. But the stuff I’ve seen in the past, from cloud providers—AWS, primarily, since that is admittedly where I tend to focus most of my time and energy—has been privilege escalation style stuff, where, okay, if you assign some users at your company—or wherever—access to this managed IAM policy, well, they’ll have suddenly have access to things that go beyond the scope of that. And that’s not good, let’s be very clear on that, but it is a bit different between that and oh, by the way, suddenly, someone in another company that has no relationship established with you at all can suddenly rummage through your data that you’re storing in Cosmos DB, their managed database offering. That’s the thing to me that I think was the big head-turning aspect of this, not just for me, but for a number of folks I’ve spoken to, in financial services, in government, in a bunch of environments where data privacy is not optional in the same way that it is when, you know, you’re running a social media for pets app.

Nir: [laugh]. Yeah, but the thing is, that until the publication of ChaosDB, no one ever heard about the [unintelligible 00:12:40] data tampering in any cloud providers. Meaning maybe in six months, you can see a similar vulnerabilities in other cloud providers that maybe other security research groups find. So yeah, so Azure was maybe the first, but we don’t think they will be the last.

Shir: Yes. And also, when we do the community research, it is very important to us to take big targets. We enjoy the research. One day, the research will be challenging and we want to do something that it was new and great, so we always put a very big targets. To actually find vulnerability in the infrastructure of the cloud provider, it was very challenging for us.

When didn’t came ChaosDB by that; we actually found it by mistake. But now we think actively that this is our next goal is to find vulnerabilities in the infrastructure and not just vulnerabilities that affect only the—vulnerabilities within the account itself, like [unintelligible 00:13:32] or bad scoped policies that affects only one account.

Corey: That seems to be the transformative angle that you don’t see nearly as much in existing studies around vulnerabilities in this space. It’s always the, “Oh, no. We could have gotten breached by those people across the hallway from us in our company,” as opposed to folks on the other side of the planet. And that is, I guess, sort of the scary thing. What has also been interesting to me, and you obviously have more experience with this than I do, but I have a hard time envisioning that, for example, AWS, having a vulnerability like this and not immediately swinging into disaster firefighting mode, sending their security execs on a six month speaking tour to explain what happened, how it got there, all of the steps that they’re taking to remediate this, but Azure published a blog post explaining this in relatively minor detail: Here are the mitigations you need to take, and as far as I can tell, then they sort of washed their hands of the whole thing and have enthusiastically begun saying absolutely nothing since.

And that I have learned is sort of fairly typical for Microsoft, and has been for a while, where they just don’t talk about these things when it arises. Does that match your experience? Is this something that you find that is common when a large company winds up being, effectively, embarrassed about their security architecture, or is this something that is unique to Microsoft tends to approach these things?

Shir: I would say in general, we really like the Microsoft MSRC team. The group in Microsoft that’s responsible for handling vulnerabilities, and I think it’s like the security division inside Microsoft, MSRC. So, we have a really good relationship and we had really good time working with them. They’re real professionals, they take our findings very seriously. I can tell that in the ChaosDB incident, they didn’t plan to publish a blog post, and they did that after the story got a lot of attention.

So, I’m looking at a PR team, and I have no idea out there decide stuff and what is their strategy, but as I mentioned earlier, we believe that there is much more cloud vulnerabilities that we never heard of, and it should change; they should publish more.

Nir: It’s also worth mentioning that Microsoft acted really quick on this vulnerability and took it very seriously. They issued the fix in less than 48 hours. They were very transparent in the entire procedure, and we had multiple teams meeting with them. The entire experience was pretty positive with each of the vulnerability we’ve ever reported to Microsoft.

Sagi: So, it’s really nice working with the guys that are responsible for security, but regarding PR, I agree that they should have posted more information regarding this incident.

Corey: The thing that I found interesting about this, and I’ve seen aspects of it before, but never this strongly is, I was watching for, I guess, what I would call just general shittiness, for lack of a better term, from the other providers doing a happy dance of, “Aha, we’re better than you are,” and I saw none of that. Because when I started talking to people in some depth at this at other companies, the immediate response—not just AWS, to be clear—has been no, no, you have to understand, this is not good for anyone because this effectively winds up giving fuel to the slow-burning fire of folks who are pulling the, “See, I told you the cloud wasn’t secure.” And now the enterprise groundhog sees that shadow and we get six more years of building data centers instead of going to the cloud. So, there’s no one in the cloud space who’s happy with this kind of revelation and this type of vulnerability. My question for you is given that you are security researchers, which means you are generally cynical and pessimistic about almost everything technological, if you’re like most of the folks in that space that I’ve spent time with, is going with cloud the wrong answer? Should people be building their own data centers out? Should they continue to be going on this full cloud direction? I mean, what can they do if everything’s on fire and terrible all the time?

Shir: So, I think that there is a trade-off when you embrace the cloud. On one hand, you get the fastest deployment times, and a good scalability regarding your infrastructure, but on the other end, when there is a security vulnerability in the cloud provider, you are immediately affected. But it is worth mentioning that the security teams or the cloud providers are doing extremely good job. Most likely, they are going to patch the vulnerability faster than it would have been patched in on-premise environment. And it’s good that you have them working for you.

And once the vulnerability is mitigated—depends on the vulnerability but in the case of ChaosDB—when the vulnerability was mitigated on Microsoft’s end, and it was mitigated completely. No one else could have exploited after the mitigated it once. Yes, it’s also good to mention that the cloud provides organization and companies a lot of security features, [unintelligible 00:18:34] I want to say security features, I would say, it provides a lot of tooling that helps security. The option to have one interface, like one API to control all of my devices, to get visibility to all of my servers, to enforce policies very easily, it’s much more secure than on-premise environments, where there is usually a big mess, a lot of vendors.

Because the power was in the on-prem, the power was on the user, so the user had a lot of options. Usually used many types of software, many types of hardware, it’s really hard to mitigate the software vulnerability in on-prem environments. It’s really helped to get the visibility. And the cloud provides a lot of security, like, a good aspects, and in my opinion, moving to the cloud for most organization would be a more secure choice than remain on-premise, unless you have a very, very small on-prem environment.

Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don’t ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.

Corey: The challenge I keep running into is that—and this is sort of probably the worst of all possible reasons to go with cloud, but let’s face it, when us-east-1 recently took an outage and basically broke a decent swath of the internet, a lot of companies were impacted, but they didn’t see their names in the headlines; it was all about Amazon’s outage. There’s a certain value when a cloud provider takes an outage or a security breach, that the headlines screaming about it are about the provider, not about you and your company as a customer of that provider. Is that something that you’re seeing manifest across the industry? Is that an unhealthy way to think about it? Because it feels almost like it’s cheating in a way. It’s, “Yeah, we had a security problem, but so did the entire internet, so it’s okay.”

Nir: So, I think that if there would be evidence that these kind of vulnerabilities were exploited while disclosure, then you wouldn’t see headlines of companies, shouting in the headlines. But in the case of the us reporting the vulnerabilities prior to anyone exploiting them, results in nowhere a company showing up in the headlines. I think it’s a slightly different situation than an outage.

Shir: Yeah, but also, when one big provider have an outage or a breach, so usually, the customers will think it’s out of my responsibility. I mean, it’s bad; my data has been leaked, but what can I do? I think it’s very easy for most people to forgive companies [unintelligible 00:21:11]. I mean, you know what, it’s just not my area. So, maybe I’m not answer that into that. [laugh].

Corey: No, no, it’s very fair. The challenge I have, as a customer of all of these providers, to be honest, is that a lot of the ways that the breach investigations are worded of, “We have seen no evidence that this has been exploited.” Okay, that simultaneously covers the two very different use cases of, “We have pored through our exhaustive audit logs and validated that no one has done this particular thing in this particular way,” but it also covers the use case, “Of, hey, we learned we should probably be logging things, but we have no evidence that anything was exploited.” Having worked with these providers at scale, my gut impression is that they do in fact, have fairly detailed logs of who’s doing what and where. Would you agree with that assessment, or do you find that you tend to encounter logging and analysis gaps as you find these exploits?

Shir: We don’t really know. Usually when—I mean, ChaosDB scenario, we got access to a Jupyter Notebook. And from the Jupyter Notebook, we continued to another internal services. And we—nobody stopped us. Nobody—we expected an email, like—

Corey: “Whatcha doing over there, buddy?”

Shir: Yeah. “Please stop doing that, and we’re investigating you.” And we didn’t get any. And also, we don’t really know if they monitor it or not. I can tell from my technical background that logging so many environments, it’s hard.

And when you do decide to log all these events, you need to decide what to log. For example, if I have a database, a managed database, do I log all the queries that customers run? It’s too much. If I have an HTTP application—a managed HTTP application—do I save all the access logs, like all the requests? And if so, what will be the retention time? For how long?

We believe that it’s very challenging on the cloud provider side, but it just an assumption. And doing the discussion with Microsoft, the didn’t disclose any, like, scenarios they had with logging. They do mention that they’re [unintelligible 00:23:26] viewing the logs and searching to see if someone exploited this vulnerability before we disclosed it. Maybe someone discovered before we did. But they told us they didn’t find anything.

Corey: One last area I’d love to discuss with you before we call it an episode is that it’s easy to view Wiz through the lens of, “Oh, we just go out and find vulnerabilities here and there, and we make companies feel embarrassed—rightfully so—for the things that they do.” But a little digging shows that you’ve been around for a little over a year as a publicly known entity, and during that time, you’ve raised $600 million in funding, which is basically like what in the world is your pitch deck where you show up to investors and your slides are just, like, copies of their emails, and you read them to them?

[laugh]

I mean, on some level, it seems like that is a… as-, astounding amount of money to raise in a short period of time. But I’ve also done a little bit of digging, and to be clear, I do not believe that you have an extortion-based business model, which is a good thing. You’re building something very interesting that does in-depth analysis of cloud workloads, and I think it’s got an awful lot of promise. How does the vulnerability research that you do tie into that larger platform, other than, let’s be honest, some spectacularly effective marketing.

Sagi: Specifically in the ChaosDB vulnerability, we were actually not looking for a vulnerability in the cloud service providers. We were originally looking for common misconfigurations that our customers can make when they set up their Cosmos DB accounts, so that our product will be able to alert our customers regarding such misconfigurations. And then we went to the Azure portal and started to enable all of the features that Cosmos DB has to offer, and when we enabled enough features, we noticed some feature that could be vulnerable, and we started digging into it. And we ended up finding ChaosDB.

But our original work was to try and find misconfigurations that our customers can make in order to protect them and not to find a vulnerability in the [CSP 00:25:31]. This was just, like, a byproduct of this research.

Shir: Yes. There is, as I mentioned earlier, our main responsibility is to add a little security rist content to the product, to help customers to find new security risks in their environment. As you mentioned, like, the escalation possibilities within cloud accounts, and bad scoped policies, and many other security risks that are in the cloud area. And also, we are a very small team inside a big company, so most of the company, they are doing heavy [unintelligible 00:26:06] and talk with customers, they understand the risks, they understand the market, what the needs for tomorrow, and maybe we are well known for our vulnerabilities, but it just a very small part of the company.

Corey: On some level, it says wonderful things about your product, and also terrifying things from different perspectives of, “Oh, yeah, we found one of the worst cloud breaches in years by accident,” as opposed to actively going in trying to find the thing that has basically put you on the global map of awareness around these things. Because there a lot of security companies out there doing different things. In fact, go to RSA, and you’ll see basically 12 companies that just repeated over and over and over with different names and different brandings, and they’re all selling some kind of firewall. This is something actively different because everyone can tell beautiful pictures with slides and whatnot, and the corporate buzzwords. You’re one of those companies that actually did something meaningful, and it felt almost like a proof of concept. On some level, the fact that you weren’t actively looking for it is kind of an amazing testament for the product itself.

Shir: Yeah. We actually used the product in the beginning, in order to overview our own environment, and what is the most common services we use. In order—and we usually we mix this information with our product managers, know to understand what customers use and what products and services we need to research in order to bring value to the product.

Sagi: Yeah, so the reason we chose to research Cosmos DB was that, we found that a lot of our Azure customers are using Cosmos DB on their production environments, and we wanted to add mitigations for common misconfigurations to our product in order to protect our customers.

Nir: Yeah, the same goes with our other research, like OMIGOD, where we’ve seen that there is a excessive amount of [unintelligible 00:27:56] installations in an Azure environment, and it raised our [laugh] it raised our attention, and then found this vulnerability. It’s mostly, like, popularity-guided research. [laugh].

Shir: Yeah. And also [unintelligible 00:28:11] mention that maybe we find vulnerabilities by accident, but the service, we are doing vulnerability itself for the past ten years, and even more. So, we are very professional and this is what we do, and this is what we like to do. And we came skilled to the [crosstalk 00:28:25].

Corey: It really is neat to see, just because every other security tool that I’ve looked at in recent memory tells you the same stuff. It’s the same problem you see in the AWS billing space that I live in. Everyone says, “Oh, we can find these inactive instances that could be right-sized.” Great, because everyone’s dealing with the same data. It’s the security stuff is no different. “Hey, this S3 bucket is open.” Yes, it’s a public web server. Please stop waking me up at two in the morning about it. It’s there by design.

But it goes back and forth with the same stuff just presented differently. This is one of the first truly novel things I’ve seen in ages. If nothing else, you convince me to kick the tires on it, and see what kind of horrifying things I can learn about my own environments with it.

Shir: Yeah, you should. [laugh]. Let’s poke [unintelligible 00:29:13].

[laugh].

Corey: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about the research you’re up to and the things that you find interesting, where can they find you all?

Shir: Most of our publication—I mean, all of our publications are under the Wiz, which is wiz.io/blog, and people can read all of our research. Just today we are announcing a new one, so feel free to go and read there. And they also feel free to approach us on Twitter, the service, we have a Twitter account. We are open for, like, messages. Just send us a message.

Corey: And we will certainly put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:29:49]. Shir, Sagi, Nir, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.

Shir: Thank you.

Sagi: Thank you.

Nir: Thank you much.

Shir: It was very fun. Yeah.

Corey: This has been Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and thank you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry insulting comment from someone else’s account.

Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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

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