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 account hijacking in cloud services

Account hijacking happens when an account (either belonging to a human or a system/application/service account) is compromised and an unauthorized person gains access to use resources and data on behalf of the (usually high-privileged) compromised account.

Here are some common consequences of account hijacking:

  • Unauthorized access to resources
  • Data exposure and leakage
  • Data deletion
  • System compromise
  • Identity theft
  • Ransomware or malicious code infection
  • Account lock-out
  • Denial of services
  • Denial of wallet (there could be a huge cloud spend due to resource misuses such as Bitcoin mining)
  • Website defacement

Some common methods of account hijacking are as follows:

  • Phishing attacks against a system administrator's account, allowing an attacker to gain access to databases with customer data
  • Access keys for a privileged account stored on an S3 bucket that was...