Book Image

Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Certification and Beyond

By : David Okeyode
Book Image

Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Certification and Beyond

By: David Okeyode

Overview of this book

Exam preparation for the AZ-500 means you’ll need to master all aspects of the Azure cloud platform and know how to implement them. With the help of this book, you'll gain both the knowledge and the practical skills to significantly reduce the attack surface of your Azure workloads and protect your organization from constantly evolving threats to public cloud environments like Azure. While exam preparation is one of its focuses, this book isn't just a comprehensive security guide for those looking to take the Azure Security Engineer certification exam, but also a valuable resource for those interested in securing their Azure infrastructure and keeping up with the latest updates. Complete with hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, this easy-to-follow guide builds a solid foundation of Azure security. You’ll not only learn about security technologies in Azure but also be able to configure and manage them. Moreover, you’ll develop a clear understanding of how to identify different attack vectors and mitigate risks. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with implementing multi-layered security to protect identities, networks, hosts, containers, databases, and storage in Azure – and more than ready to tackle the AZ-500.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Implement Identity and Access Security for Azure
7
Section 2: Implement Azure Platform Protection
12
Section 3: Secure Storage, Applications, and Data

Securing management ports with JIT VM access

Internet attackers are always hunting for connected systems with open management ports. Once a target has been identified, it can be scanned for vulnerabilities that could be exploited, or a brute-force login attack could be performed. If the host is successfully compromised, it can be used as the entry point to proceed further in an attack chain or even used as a landing zone to compromise other victims!

To reduce this attack surface, the recommendation is to keep management ports such as RDP and SSH closed and only open them when needed for administrative tasks. This is exactly what JIT VM access allows us to do, without the management overhead of closing and opening these ports manually.

To use JIT, we need to enable the Azure Defender pricing tier of Azure Security Center (you will be doing this in the following hands-on exercise). To enable JIT for a VM, you must be a resource manager VM (classic VMs are not supported), the VM...