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 the abuse of cloud services

The abuse of cloud services is about using the scale of the cloud provider's resources and the multi-tenancy architecture to conduct malicious activities. Some common consequences of the abuse of cloud services are as follows:

  • Loss of service availability due to DDoS attacks
  • Monetary loss due to the use of cloud resources being exploited for bitcoin mining without the customer's awareness

Some common examples of the abuse of cloud services are as follows:

  • Using the cloud to deploy multiple servers and conducting DDoS attacks
  • Using the cloud to deploy multiple expensive servers for bitcoin mining
  • Using the cloud to spread email spam and phishing attacks
  • Using the cloud for brute force attacks on passwords

Some best practices for detecting and mitigating against the abuse of cloud services are as follows:

  • Configure billing alerts to get notified in advance about any increase...