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 Azure AD users with multi-factor authentication (MFA)

If we look at the threat landscape against user identities today, there are few types of attacks where having a complex password can help. Complex passwords could provide some mitigation against threats such as password spray and brute-force attacks, but they offer no mitigation against other prominent identity threats such as credential stuffing, breach replay, phishing, database extraction, and malware sniffing. Why? Because in all those cases, the password is already exposed! For example, in the case of a successful phishing attack, the attacker already has the password! This is why MFA is critical to identifying security. Luckily for us, Azure AD comes with native MFA capabilities that are easy to implement.

Azure AD MFA enables users to validate their identities using an additional form of authentication (beyond username and password) during sign-in. When implemented, users have the option of validating their identities...