Zero-Touch BitLocker with PowerShell

7th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

The majority of IT engineers and architects traverse various forms of security on a daily basis ranging from our complex alphanumeric corporate logon passwords to the increasingly common MFA prompts on our mobiles. You could say that we have become experts in navigating modern security measures required to stay protected. But perhaps you’re not familiar in planning and rolling out that same security, at scale, to your organisation’s Windows laptops in the form of disk encryption.… [Keep reading] “Zero-Touch BitLocker with PowerShell”

Creating Azure Storage SAS Tokens with ARM Templates

7th of November, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Shared access signatures, sometimes also called SAS tokens, allow for delegating access to a designated part of an Azure resource with a defined set of permissions. They can be used to allow various types of access to your Azure services while keeping your access keys secret.

In a recent update to Azure Resource Manager, Microsoft has added the ability to create SAS tokens from ARM templates. While this is a general-purpose feature that will hopefully work across a multitude of Azure services, for now it only seems to work with Azure Storage (at least of the services I’ve checked).… [Keep reading] “Creating Azure Storage SAS Tokens with ARM Templates”

Automatic Key Rotation for Azure Services

19th of September, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Securely managing keys for services that we use is an important, and sometimes difficult, part of building and running a cloud-based application. In general I prefer not to handle keys at all, and instead rely on approaches like managed service identities with role-based access control, which allow for applications to authenticate and authorise themselves without any keys being explicitly exchanged. However, there are a number of situations where do we need to use and manage keys, such as when we use services that don’t support role-based access control.… [Keep reading] “Automatic Key Rotation for Azure Services”

Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair

21st of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Container security is (or should be) a concern to anyone running software on Docker Containers. Gone are the days when running random Images found on the internet was common place. Security guides for Containers are common now: examples from Microsoft and others can be found easily online.
The two leading Container Orchestrators also offer their own security guides: Kubernetes Security Best Practices and Docker security.

Container Image Origin

One of the single biggest factors in Container security is determined by the origin of container Images:

  1. It is recommended to run your own private Registry to distribute Images
  2. It is recommended to scan these Images against known vulnerabilities.
… [Keep reading] “Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair”

SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379

3rd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Redis Cache is an advanced key-value store that we should have all come across in one way or another by now. Azure, AWS and many other cloud providers have fully managed offerings for it, which is “THE” way we want to consume it.  As a little bit of insight, Redis itself was designed for use within a trusted private network and does not support encrypted connections. Public offerings like Azure use TLS reverse proxies to overcome this limitation and provide security around the service.… [Keep reading] “SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379”

Protect Your Business and Users from Email Phishing in a Few Simple Steps

1st of August, 2017 / / No Comments

The goal of email phishing attacks is obtain personal or sensitive information from a victim such as credit card, passwords or username data, for malicious purposes. That is to say trick a victim into performing an unwitting action aimed at stealing sensitive information from them. This form of attack is generally conducted by means of spoofed emails or instant messaging communications which try to deceive their target as to the nature of the sender and purpose of the email they’ve received.… [Keep reading] “Protect Your Business and Users from Email Phishing in a Few Simple Steps”

Windows 10 Domain Join + AAD and MFA Trusted IPs

24th of July, 2017 / / 11 Comments

Background

Those who have rolled out Azure MFA (in the cloud) to non-administrative users are probably well aware of the nifty Trusted IPs feature.   For those that are new to this, the short version is that this capability is designed to make it a little easier on the end user experience by allowing you to define a set of ‘trusted locations’ (e.g. your corporate network) in which MFA is not required.
This capability works via two methods:

  • Defining a set of ‘Trusted” IP addresses.
… [Keep reading] “Windows 10 Domain Join + AAD and MFA Trusted IPs”

Social Engineering Is A Threat To Your Organisation

12th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

social_engineering
Of the many attacks, hacks and exploits perpetrated against organisations. One of the most common vulnerabilities businesses face and need to guard against is the result of the general goodness or weakness, depending on how you choose to look at it, of our human natures exploited through means of social engineering.
Social engineering is a very common problem in cyber security. It consists of the simple act of getting an individual to unwittingly perform an unsanctioned or undersirable action under false pretenses.… [Keep reading] “Social Engineering Is A Threat To Your Organisation”

Cloud Security Research: Cross-Cloud Adversary Analytics

12th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

Newly published research from security firm Rapid7 is painting a worrying picture of hackers and malicious actors increasingly looking for new vectors against organizations with resources hosted in public cloud infrastructure environments.
Some highlights of Rapid7’s report:

  • The six cloud providers in our study make up nearly 15% of available IPv4 addresses on the internet.
  • 22% of Softlayer nodes expose database services (MySQL & SQL Server) directly to the internet.
  • Web services are prolific, with 53-80% of nodes in each provider exposing some type of web service.
… [Keep reading] “Cloud Security Research: Cross-Cloud Adversary Analytics”

Security Vulnerability Revealed in Azure Active Directory Connect

10th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft ADFS
The existence of a new and potentially serious privilege escalation and password reset vulnerability in Azure Active Directory Connect (AADC) was recently made public by Microsoft.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/connect/active-directory-aadconnectsync-whatis
Fixing the problem can be achieved by means of an upgrade to the latest available release of AADC 1.1.553.0.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=47594
The Microsoft security advisory qualifies the issue as important and was published on Technet under reference number 4033453:
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/4033453.aspx#ID0EN
Azure Active Directory Connect as we know takes care of all operations related to the synchronization of identity information between on-premises environments and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Security Vulnerability Revealed in Azure Active Directory Connect”