Episode description

Links:

• Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate has expired, and it might break your devices: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/21/lets-encrypt-root-expiry/
• Slack was bitten by DNSSEC: https://Twitter.com/tqbf/status/1443654964556013569
• Prepare For Cybersecurity Assessments From Your Customers: https://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/prepare-for-cybersecurity-assessments-from-your-customers
• AWS Lambda now supports triggering Lambda functions from an Amazon SQS queue in a different account: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/09/aws-lambda-lambda-function-amazon-sqs-queue/
• Migrating custom Landing Zone with RAM to AWS Control Tower: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/migrating-custom-landing-zone-with-ram-to-aws-control-tower/
• Introducing the Ransomware Risk Management on AWS Whitepaper: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/introducing-the-ransomware-risk-management-on-aws-whitepaper/
• Validate IAM policies in CloudFormation templates using IAM Access Analyzer: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/validate-iam-policies-in-cloudformation-templates-using-iam-access-analyzer/
• Pacu: The Open Source AWS Exploitation Framework: https://rhinosecuritylabs.com/aws/pacu-open-source-aws-exploitation-framework/

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

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst Canary. This might take a little bit to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org, in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, or anything else like that that you can generate in various parts of your environment, wherever you want them to live. It gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example, and the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use them. It’s an awesome approach to detecting breaches. I’ve used something similar for years myself before I found them. Check them out. But wait, there’s more because they also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of: canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment and manage them centrally. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files that it presents on a fake file store, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, instead you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached the very hard way. So, check it out. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I am so glad I found them. I love it.” Again, those URLs are canarytokens.org and canary.tools. And the first one is free because of course it is. The second one is enterprise-y. You’ll know which one of those you fall into. Take a look. I’m a big fan. More to come from Thinkst Canary in the weeks ahead.

Corey: Somehow we made it through an entire week without a major vendor having a headline-level security breach. You know, I could get used to this; I’ll take, “It’s harder for me to figure out what to talk about here,” over, “A bunch of customers are scrambling because their providers have failed them,” every time.

So, let’s see what the community had to say. Last week, as you’re probably aware, Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate expiredwhich caused pain for a bunch of folks. Any device or configuration that hadn’t been updated for a few years is potentially going to see things breaking. The lesson here is to be aware that certificates do expire. The antipattern is to do super-long registrations for thing, but that just makes it worse.

One of the things Let’s Encrypt got very right is forcing 90-day certificate rotations for client certs. When you’ve got to do that every three months, you know where all of your certificates are. If you’ve got to replace it once every ten years, you’ll have no clue; that was six employees ago.

In bad week news, Slack was bitten by DNSSEC when they attempted and failed to roll it out. DNSSEC is a bag of pain it’s best not to bother with, as a general rule. DNS is always a bag of pain because of caching and TTL issues. In effect, Slack tried to roll out DNSSEC—probably due to a demand by some big corporate customer—had it fail, panicked and rolled back the change, and was in turn bitten by outages as a bunch of DNS resolvers had the DS key cached, but the authoritative nameservers stopped publishing it. This is a mess and a great warning to those of us who might naively assume that anything like DNSSEC that offers improved security comes without severe tradeoffs. Measure twice, cut once because mistakes are going to show.

I also found a somewhat alarmist article talking about cybersecurity assessments from your customers and fine, but it brings up a good point. If you’re somehow responsible for security but don’t have security in your job title—which, you know, this show is aimed at—you may one day be surprised to have someone from sales pop up and ask you to fill out a form from a prospective customer. Ignore the alarm and the panic but you’re going to want to get towards something approaching standardization around how you handle those.

The first time you get one of these, it’s a novel exercise; by the tenth, you just want to have a prepared statement you can hand them so you can move on with things. Well, those prepared statements are often called things like, “SOC 2 certifications.” There’s a spectrum and where you fall on it depends upon who you work for and what you do. So, take them seriously and don’t be surprised when you get one.

AWS had a few interesting security-related announcements. AWS Lambda now supports triggering Lambda functions from an Amazon SQS queue in a different account. That doesn’t sound like a security announcement, so why am I talking about it? Because until recently, it wasn’t possible so a lot of folks scoped their IAM policies very...