As VM automation becomes more and more predominant in cloud environments, the issue of abstraction becomes more important. Consider if you will, an infrastructure in which the creation and management of VMs is fully automated. Now put all those applications and information and VMs in one big cloud that is all self-sufficient and constantly moving around due to load balancing and other automated processes. Then, add in cloud applications, plugins, security and anything else that could possibly run in that environment. Then, connect it all up so that every part of the infrastructure is inter-dependent and connects through a broker. And for fun’s sake, let’s assume there is a memory leak on one of the servers and your start losing VMs. Continue reading
Troubleshooting
May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor.
It’s been awhile since I’ve written about security, but last week I came across a really great (but frightening) example of how security is affected with virtual environments. An organization who was running a virtual environment suddenly lost access to their entire infrastructure. It wasn’t a result of a badly configured virtual environment, it was arguably one of the first examples that I have come across of an attack against a virtual environment. I don’t know if it was intentional, but it’s a very interesting story of just how the threat landscape is adapting.
Essentially what happened was that the Windows server their virtual environment was running on had suffered a malware infection. The worst thing was that it was a known exploit, but hadn’t been patched. What the exploit did was cause the server to hit the network stack with enough traffic to cause a DDoS attack against the management console. This brought not just everything down, but rendered the environment unavailable.
Can you imagine if this type of vulnerability happens in production environment, such as in a financial or e-commerce organization? Aside from the financial ramifications of not being available to customers, but if you couldn’t recover any of your data? This type of attack could theoretically cause irreparable damage to a company.
I know the whole concept of securing virtual environments is a new thing. I work with several research groups within the Cloud Security Alliance so I am aware of just how little information there is out there as it relates to best practices. But when a real-world example of how these types of attacks are starting to affect virtual environments, it makes it clear just how important these conversations are.
Now I am not sure what happened to the organization who was the unfortunate victim of the attack. I hope that the fact that they figured out it was a network issue means that once the vulnerability is patched the VMs can be restarted. But I doubt that this is a rare and isolated example, which means that it is officially time for security and infrastructure folks to step up their game.
What Happens In The Cloud, Stays In The Cloud
When looking at how virtualization and cloud have changed traditional security, a lot of it has to do with visibility. Until recently, security was focused on physical controls and visibility into the network, and so solutions were designed to sit on the perimeter or in-line with the network. Intrusion detection and prevention is delivered through in-line IPS and next generation firewalls that feed Security Information Event Managers (SIEMs or SEMs) which logs the traffic and notes any discrepancies based on the policies and controls that the SIEM device was tuned to watch for. This is standard practice in all IT shops, but what changes with virtualization? Continue reading
Tinder Stratus 