Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By : Eyal Estrin
Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By: Eyal Estrin

Overview of this book

Securing resources in the cloud is challenging, given that each provider has different mechanisms and processes. Cloud Security Handbook helps you to understand how to embed security best practices in each of the infrastructure building blocks that exist in public clouds. This book will enable information security and cloud engineers to recognize the risks involved in public cloud and find out how to implement security controls as they design, build, and maintain environments in the cloud. You'll begin by learning about the shared responsibility model, cloud service models, and cloud deployment models, before getting to grips with the fundamentals of compute, storage, networking, identity management, encryption, and more. Next, you'll explore common threats and discover how to stay in compliance in cloud environments. As you make progress, you'll implement security in small-scale cloud environments through to production-ready large-scale environments, including hybrid clouds and multi-cloud environments. This book not only focuses on cloud services in general, but it also provides actual examples for using AWS, Azure, and GCP built-in services and capabilities. By the end of this cloud security book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of how to implement security in cloud environments effectively.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Securing Infrastructure Cloud Services
6
Section 2: Deep Dive into IAM, Auditing, and Encryption
10
Section 3: Threats and Compliance Management
14
Section 4: Advanced Use of Cloud Services

Detecting and mitigating insider threats in cloud services

Insider threat is a concept where an authorized employee (that is, an insider) performs an action (either maliciously or accidentally) that they are not supposed to. Some common consequences of insider threats are as follows:

  • Loss of data
  • Data leakage
  • System downtime
  • Loss of company reputation
  • Monetary loss due to lawsuits

Some common examples of insider threats are as follows:

  • An administrator clicks on a phishing email from an unknown source, and as a result, a file server gets infected by ransomware, and all the files are encrypted.
  • An employee with the privilege to access an accounting system leaves their laptop unattended and an unauthorized person takes over his laptop and steals customer data.
  • A sub-contractor with access to databases with customer email addresses exports customer data and sells it on the dark web.
  • An administrator with access to backup files decides...