This post was previously published on The New Stack

Regardless of which role a person has in an organization, they will always need access to one or more databases to be able to perform the functions of their job. Whether that person is a cashier at McDonald’s or a technical account manager supporting a Fortune 500 company, data entry and retrieval is core to the services they provide. 

In this article, we will explore some of the benefits that automation brings to an organization’s data security. We will explain how introducing automation into existing database access-control methods can increase efficiency and consistency, and we will also discuss how security-focused automation adds extra layers of protection, like improved data integrity and privacy controls, that help your business stay secure.

Removing Direct Access to Databases

Before modern technologies, all client information was readily available to everyone in the office in a nearby filing cabinet. Later, that same concept was transferred to electronic databases where everyone looks up everything in “the system.” 

This model is arguably easier to build, but it’s not scalable since all the data in each system has to be available to all employees — all of the time. It also increases the amount of manual cross-checking that people need to do between systems. And, don’t forget the risk of data drift as well as the heightened risk of a data leakage.

There are many benefits to automating data access between the people who ask for it and the actual databases themselves. Automated workflows can create a full view and flow of your data by pulling the requested pieces of information from their sources of truth, automatically. 

For example, when you pull an employee profile from an automated system, contact information comes from the HR system, information about currently assigned projects comes from a tool like Jira and the list of corporate assets that the employee has signed out is pulled from a tool like Service Now.

In addition, automated database access-control methods can reduce duplicate data entry, which can in turn reduce errors and drift. In the aforementioned employee profile, for example, the contact information always comes from the HR system, so the payroll system doesn’t need to have its own copy, nor does the helpdesk solution.

The Principle of Least Privilege

Adding a proxy between people and data by using automated workflows also allows you to embed security best practices and other controls. The principle of least privilege is at the core of these data access controls. 

For example, if someone is in a certain sales group, the automated solution can filter out all data that isn’t relevant to their needs. The same goes for people who pick orders in the warehouse; they don’t need to see how much every item costs or which credit cards are being used. You can make this as fine-grained as you want, but it requires that you put data access controls in place to support the safeguards.

A second approach that some organizations take is to log everything and audit it against what people are supposed to be doing rather than block access to the areas that people don’t need to access. This is technically easier to build, but it requires more people to run.

Data Access Approval Requests

The beauty of using security automation as a data broker is that it has the ability to validate data-retrieval requests. This includes verifying that the requestor actually has permission to see the data being requested. 

If the proper permissions aren’t in place, the user can submit a request to be added to a specific role through the normal request channels, which is typically the way to go. With automated data access control, this request could be generated and sent within the solution to streamline the process. 

This also allows additional context-specific information to be included in the data-access request automatically. For example, if someone requests data that they do not have access to within their role, the solution can be configured to look up the database owner, populate an access request and send it to the owner of the data, who can then approve one-time access or grant access for a certain period of time. A common scenario where this is useful is when an employee goes on vacation and someone new is helping with their clients’ needs while they are out.  

Audit Trails

As we mentioned above, some organizations might opt to log everything to track who is doing what. Any good data security automation solution will have the capability of creating extensive audit logs. This audit capability can – and should – be used to track both positive and negative events. A positive event would be like granting Fen permission to see the data that she is requesting, while a negative event would be like refusing Vijay access to the data of a patient who is seen at a different branch of the clinic.

Both types of events can be mined for trends. Every time Netflix alerts you that you’ve logged in from a new location, for example, it’s because its solution logged a positive authentication event and the backend solution then did something with that event when it arrived.

Automated Data Access Workflows

As we outlined above, incorporating secure data-access workflows that are run within automation frameworks into your existing business processes improves the integrity of the data being moved and ensures better privacy controls by showing only the data that is required. It also exposes more metrics, which can be tracked to find more areas that can be optimized and more places where additional automation might add more value. Companies like Torq can help organizations introduce data security automation into their infrastructure. Torq’s solutions are designed to address common scenarios as well as high-value use cases.

This post was previously published on The New Stack

You’ve secured your cloud identities. You’ve hardened your cloud security posture. You’ve configured strong cloud access controls. But there’s still one more thing you need in order to secure your cloud environment: a cloud workload protection platform, or CWPP. 

Cloud workload protection platforms secure the workloads that run on your cloud — which are distinct from the infrastructure, user identities and configurations that form the foundation of your cloud environment.

This article unpacks why a CWPP is a critical ingredient in any cloud security strategy. It explains how CWPPs work, identifies examples of workloads that you can secure with CWPPs  and discusses the importance of automation within the context of a CWPP.

What Is Cloud Workload Protection?

Cloud workload protection is the practice of securing workloads that you deploy in the cloud. In other words, cloud workload protection mitigates risks that exist at the workload level of your cloud environment, as opposed to the infrastructure or configuration level.

The workloads in question could be software, data or a combination thereof that your organization hosts in the cloud. For example, cloud workload protection could apply to the operating system and application running in a cloud-based VM instance, or it could secure the data inside an object storage bucket.

What Is a CWPP?

Tools that provide cloud workload protection are often called cloud workload protection platforms, or CWPPs. Protecting cloud workloads is important because most other types of cloud security practices don’t address workload risks.

Cloud security posture management, or CSPM, alerts you to problems within cloud infrastructure configurations that could create security issues, like IAM policies that provide public access to sensitive data. But CSPM doesn’t cover configuration risks within workloads, such as a lack of encryption for data as it moves within an application.

Likewise, you can track cloud metrics and logs to identify potential security threats. But that data originates mostly from cloud IaaS providers, not individual applications, so it does little to reveal security risks that are specific to applications or data you’ve deployed in the cloud.

CWPP solutions fill these gaps by ensuring that you can protect the code and data that actually run on your cloud, not just the underlying cloud environment.

It’s also worth noting that cloud workload protection platforms help you secure workloads across multiple clouds. Because CWPPs focus on your workload rather than the cloud that hosts it, you can use cloud workload protection to identify security risks in any type of cloud-based workload, even as it moves across clouds.

CWPPs at Work: Some Examples

To contextualize cloud workload protection further, consider how it applies in the following domains.

Containers

When you deploy cloud workloads using containers, you must address special security challenges. You need to make sure that containers can’t run in privileged mode, for example. You must also scan container images for malware.

Cloud workload protection for containers ensures that you have the specific processes in place that are required to protect containerized workloads, independent of other security processes that you apply to your cloud environment.

Kubernetes Security

Kubernetes, too, poses a variety of special security challenges that can only be addressed at the workload level. You must ensure that Kubernetes role-based access control policies and security contexts are configured properly, for instance. You should also use Kubernetes audit logs to monitor for potential security risks that arise within your Kubernetes environment.

Virtual Machine Security

Even if your cloud VM service is properly configured, security issues may lurk inside your VMs. The images you use could contain malware, or just configurations (like the absence of a kernel hardening framework) that lead to a weak security posture. Cloud workload protection alerts you to these risks.

Vulnerability Scanning

Vulnerabilities can arise in any number of places across a cloud environment — within applications, within operating systems, within container images and so on.

Cloud workload protection lets you scan for vulnerabilities across all components and layers of your workloads. Think of it as one-stop shopping for vulnerability discovery and management at the workload level, regardless of which workloads you run or which clouds host them.

Serverless Security

Serverless functions abstract applications from the underlying server environment, which reduces potential attack surfaces. But the functions themselves could still contain vulnerabilities. They could also be configured in ways that increase risks. Cloud workload protection automatically discovers problems like these within serverless functions.

Application Security

Cloud-based applications come in many forms, but they can all contain security risks — such as malware, vulnerable software components and a lack of security controls like encryption. By scanning applications for risks like these, cloud workload protection helps ensure application security across your cloud environment.

Choosing a Cloud Workload Protection Platform 

When integrating cloud workload protection into your cloud security strategy, strive to implement a solution that is:

• Fully automated, because you can’t feasibly manage workload-level security risks by hand.
• Cloud-agnostic, so you can deploy to secure any workload on any cloud.

A service such as Torq.io meets both of these requirements. It lets anyone – not just cybersecurity experts, but any member of your organization – define security rules that workloads must meet. Then Torq automatically and continuously scans your cloud workloads for deviation from these rules.

The result is fully secure and automated cloud workload protection, no matter how your cloud environment is configured or what you run on it.

This post was previously published on The New Stack

The Origins of Modern Cloud/IT Environments

With agile development, the software development life cycle has evolved, with a focus on customer satisfaction to enhance product features based on user feedback. This helps shorten the time to market, since teams can release a minimally viable product, then continuously improve its features. The agile technique encourages team cooperation through sprints, daily standups, retrospectives, testing, quality assurance and deployment. Through continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD), along with the integration of security into operations, teams can deliver software faster. 

Yet, as more and more businesses adopt cloud computing, cybersecurity threats grow due to bad actors who target the security vulnerabilities of their complex hybrid infrastructures, which include public cloud services. Consequently, SecOps plays a crucial role in ensuring that DevOps teams prioritize security.  Modern security tools and frameworks aid SecOps teams, providing zero-downtime deployment, automated deployment and reduced attack surfaces.

Security Operation Center (SOC) and SecOps Evolution

Traditionally, security was an afterthought in most IT environments. It was structured as a siloed department and only came to the forefront when an incident had been discovered. Key organizations, such as government agencies, had network operations centers (NOCs), which focused on detecting incidents in their network devices. 

While traditional security operations centers (SOCs) were reactive to security threats and attacks, the next generation of SOCs takes a more proactive approach using automation and real-time security information and event management (SIEM). Modern SOCs are more sophisticated. They emphasize collaboration between people, technologies and processes to thoroughly monitor and investigate security events in real time, which enables them to prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks. They go above and beyond standard security compliance by establishing cyber defense and incident response centers that collaborate to manage threat intelligence and system security.

Cyber warfare has never been more complex, and the bad news is that it is only becoming more advanced and more pervasive. Security operations and SOCs are under increasing pressure to identify and respond to threats quickly, as well as to harden defenses against a growing range of threats. As a result, the  IT frameworks D3FEND and MITRE ATT&CK have been developed to solve many problems. These tools are used to detect, debug and protect against security breaches and attacks in today’s cloud systems.

To be successful, modern SecOps teams must be given more authority to use security solutions that replace “black box” security teams with automation, threat hunting, vulnerability management and real-time monitoring. 

What Is the MITRE ATT&CK Framework?

MITRE ATT&CK (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge) is a knowledge source that assists SecOps intelligence decision-makers. It’s a behavioral threat modelused to develop, test and improve behavior-based detection capabilities over time. Penetration testers use the MITRE ATT&CK methodology to orchestrate their attacks and locate vulnerabilities in your infrastructure, then exploit them and report their findings. It helps enterprises understand malicious behaviors and mitigate the risks and threats they face.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework employs a set of methodologies and tactics to identify compromise indicators , including defense evasion techniques to evade detection, lateral movement techniques to spread throughout your infrastructure and exfiltration to steal data. Employing these adversarial tactics helps enterprises create a comprehensive list of known prospective attack techniques, which SOC teams can use to find potential weaknesses, then focus on developing defensive measures.  

What Is the MITRE D3FEND Framework?

MITRE D3FEND is a companion of MITRE ATT&CK. It uses a knowledge graph to provide SOC teams with defensive countermeasures to harden and protect their infrastructures based on the identified attack tactics and techniques. D3FEND complements the threat-based ATT&CK model by providing ways to counter common offensive techniques, thereby reducing a system’s potential attack surface.

How Can Modern SOCs Benefit from MITRE ATT&CK and D3FEND Frameworks?

Security breaches, which can result in serious consequences such as lost customers, lost income and damaged reputations, remain a constant threat. SOC teams can use the ATT&CK framework to measure their effectiveness in detecting, analyzing and responding to cyber intrusions. They can also use ATT&CK to better understand and document adversarial group profiles so that they can simulate possible adversarial attack scenarios and come up with cybersecurity controls. Modern SOC teams can use MITRE D3FEND to implement security solutions with the detailed countermeasures that it provides. Using the ATT&CK and D3FEND frameworks together will help teams not only identify defensive gaps, but also make more strategic security tooling decisions.

One key concept behind the MITRE ATT&CK and D3FEND frameworks is threat hunting. Threat hunting tools search  for cyber threats lurking undetected in network and security defense endpoints. Here at Torq, we provide a threat-hunting tool that will quickly automate your SOC workflows in extended detection and response; security information and event management; and endpoint detection and response.  Start automating today!

This post was previously published on The New Stack

Today, anyone can contribute to some of the world’s most important software platforms and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, the Linux kernel or Python. They can do this because these platforms are open source, meaning they are collaboratively developed by global communities.

What if we applied the same principles of democratization and free access to cybersecurity? In other words, what if anyone could contribute to security initiatives and help build a cybersecurity culture without requiring privileged access or specialized expertise?

To explore those questions, it’s worth considering the way that open source has democratized software development and comparing it to the potential we stand to realize by democratizing security. 

Although the connection between open source software and democratized security only goes so far, thinking from this angle suggests a new approach to solving the cybersecurity challenges that have become so intractable for modern businesses.

So, let’s take a look at how open source democratized development and what it might look like to do the same thing for security.

Open Source and the Democratization of Software Development

Until the origin of GNU and the Free Software Foundation in the mid-1980s, no one thought of software as something that anyone could help design or create. Instead, if you wanted to build software, you needed membership in an elite club. You generally had to be a credentialed, professional programmer, and you typically had to have a job that put you in a position to create software.

GNU began to change this by allowing volunteers to build software, like the GNU C compiler, that eventually became massively important across the IT industry. Then, in the early 1990s, the advent of the Linux kernel project changed things even more. The Linux kernel was created by an undergraduate, Linus Torvalds, whom no professional programmer had ever heard of. If a twenty-something non-professional Finnish student could create a major software platform, it was clear that anyone could.

Today, anyone still can. You don’t need a special degree or professional connections to contribute to a platform like Kubernetes, as thousands of independent programmers do. Nor do today’s users need to rely on a handful of elite programmers to write the software they want to use. They can go out and help write it themselves via participation in open source projects. (Of course, the big caveat is that you need special skills to write open source software. But we’ll get to that point later.)

As a result of this democratization of development, it has become much easier for users to obtain the software they’d like to use, as opposed to the software that closed-source vendors think they should use. Open source has also turned out to make software development faster, and it tends to lower the overall cost of software development.

Towards an Open Source Cybersecurity Framework

Now, imagine what would happen if the world of cybersecurity were democratized in the way that software development has been democratized by open source.

It would create a world where security would cease to be the domain of elite security experts alone. Instead, anyone would be able to help identify the security problems that they face, then build the solutions they need to address them, just as software users today can envision the software platforms and features they’d like to see, then help implement them through open source projects.

In other words, users wouldn’t need to wait on middlemen — that is, the experts who hold the reins — to build the security solutions they needed. They could build them themselves.

That doesn’t mean that security experts would go away. They’d still be critical, just as professional programmers working for major corporations continue to play an important role alongside independent programmers in open source software development. 

But instead of requiring small groups of security specialists to identify all the cybersecurity risks and solve them on their own, these tasks would be democratized and shared across organizations as a whole.

The result would be a world where security solutions could be implemented faster. The solutions would also more closely align with the needs of users, because the users would be building them themselves. 

And security operations would likely become less costly, too, because the work would be spread out across organizations instead of being handled only by high-earning security professionals.

The Differences Between Open Source and Security Democratization

It’s important, of course, not to overstretch the analogy between open source democratization and security democratization. In particular, there are two main differences between these concepts.

One is that, whereas open source software can be built and shared by communities at large, security is something that is mostly used only internally. The security workflows that users might define using security democratization tools would only apply inside their own companies, rather than being shared with users at large.

The other, bigger limitation is that it takes special skills to build software. While it’s possible for non-coders to contribute to open source projects by doing things like writing documentation or designing artwork, most contributions require the ability to code.

In contrast, security democratization doesn’t have to require specialized security skills on the part of users. By taking advantage of no-code tools that let anyone define, search for and remediate security risks, businesses can democratize their security cultures without having to teach every employee to be a cybersecurity expert.

What this means is that, although it may seem far-fetched at first glance to democratize security, the means for doing so — no-code automation frameworks — are already there. They just need to be placed in the hands of users.

Conclusion

Over the course of a generation, the open source software movement radically transformed the way software is built. Although plenty of closed-source code continues to exist, programmers today can contribute to critical software platforms that operate on an open source model without requiring special connections or credentials. The result has been software that better supports users, and that takes less time and money to build.

Businesses can reap similar benefits in the realm of security by using no-code security automation tools to democratize their approach to security. When anyone can define security requirements and implement tools to meet them, security becomes more efficient, more scalable and better tailored to the needs of each user or group.

Maintaining an online business presence nowadays means that malicious actors are going to target and likely exploit any application vulnerabilities they can find sooner or later. According to the 2021 Mid Year Data Breach Report, although the number of breaches has declined by 24%, the staggering number of records that were exposed (18.8 billion) means that there is still room for improvement.

How can you protect your business from the constant threat of exposure and security breaches? One crucial step is to establish solid foundational layers of security controls that check and validate every part of the SDLC. By using automation when performing those checks, you can detect and prevent common security risks and exposures before they end up in production.

Keep reading for a comprehensive overview of application security automation, along with four ways to automate security ops to protect the core of your business from data breaches.

What Is Application Security?

The term application security (AppSec) refers to the series of processes and tools related to security controls that development teams use during SDLC. Creating secure software is hard, mainly because there are myriad risks involved. Attackers prefer to target web applications instead of infrastructure components because these applications offer a convenient way to access databases or other internal systems. Defenders need to plug up every conceivable hole, while attackers only have to find one vulnerable spot. This often results in an uneven playing field.

To counter that pervasive threat, development teams must adopt effective methodologies and best practices for developing secure software. One way to do this is to utilize tools to analyze the code both statically and dynamically to pick up any known insecure idioms. For example, a tool might flag code that is implementing unsafe casting, secrets that have been committed to VCS, or a failure to close streams after they have been used. Developers can manually review these issues and fix them before they get deployed to production.

Another strategy is to scan application dependencies. For example, when developing a financial app, developers might use an open source library that offers a convenient currency model. But how would they know that this library was safe? Dependency scanners monitor those dependencies and check to see if they are out of date or suffer from open CVEs. That way, they will know as soon as possible if anything changes.

Writing secure software starts with integrating proper application security controls and automating the process. We will explain that part next. 

The Main Benefits of Automating Application Security

As we mentioned earlier, there are several tools and processes that development teams employ to flag risks in their software repositories. Automating this task helps you make the most of this process. That’s because you can achieve better coverage when looking for threats and find them sooner when you eliminate the manual parts of the process.

In addition, you will be better equipped to respond to security incidents. Your AppSec teams will have all the context they need to address any issues. Finally, you can achieve better compliance and auditing scores, since this eliminates the risks involved in working manually, such as skipped events and slower response rates. 

Next, we’ll explain four important ways to automate application security operations.

Four Ways to Automate Application Security Ops

1. Trigger Automated Security Flows as Part of Your CI/CD Pipeline

The best place to start with automation is to implement shift-left security within the CI/CD pipelines. When we say CI/CD pipelines, we mean the various steps that are taken when pushing code in a remote environment. These steps include admission to VCS and triggering the CI pipeline, static code analyzers, security alerts, bots, and notification systems as well as external security integrations. Incorporating these steps will give you the best chance of protecting your application from exploits.

2. Validate/Enforce Requirements and Perform Periodic Checks When You Create Repositories, Components, and Cloud Environments 

When developers create new repositories or provision new clusters that operate company accounts, there should be a preliminary check to apply basic security templates and policies. This will prevent gaps or missed security controls from the moment you create those resources until you actually use them. You want to create default standards for all components that prevent them from existing in a sub-standard security state. 

3. Orchestrate Follow-Ups for Application Security Findings, Assign and Escalate Issues, and Validate Fixes 

Once the system pinpoints security issues in your resources, you should use a separate mechanism to capture those events and store them in a threat intelligence platform. As we explained in this article on the basics of threat intelligence, you can pull and combine those indicators, run customized workflows, and deliver the information you collected to the system of your choice.

4. Automate Updates to Infrastructure-as-Code and Configuration Settings

Finally, consider your usage of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and your configuration settings. These internal tools are part of the developer tooling, and they are also susceptible to exploitation. You will have to enforce the same kind of rules and policies when using those programs. It’s even better if you have an automated tool that monitors and updates only the development tools in your infrastructure. This way, you will not risk exposure or a major upgrade process if some of them become outdated or are found to contain a known vulnerability.

Next Steps: Automating Application Security Ops with Torq

The best way to automate application security ops is to create a strong foundation of tools, processes, and techniques. Attackers are constantly trying to exploit vulnerable applications. However, automating application security ops doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, security and DevOps teams should be able to use a low-code platform to achieve those targets.

Torq offers a complete no-code platform for automating application security ops using threat intelligence, threat hunting, security bots, and workflow modules. You can request a demo here.