Book Image

Mastering Azure Security - Second Edition

By : Mustafa Toroman, Tom Janetscheck
Book Image

Mastering Azure Security - Second Edition

By: Mustafa Toroman, Tom Janetscheck

Overview of this book

Security is integrated into every cloud, but this makes users put their guard down as they take cloud security for granted. Although the cloud provides higher security, keeping their resources secure is one of the biggest challenges many organizations face as threats are constantly evolving. Microsoft Azure offers a shared responsibility model that can address any challenge with the right approach. Revised to cover product updates up to early 2022, this book will help you explore a variety of services and features from Microsoft Azure that can help you overcome challenges in cloud security. You'll start by learning the most important security concepts in Azure, their implementation, and then advance to understanding how to keep resources secure. The book will guide you through the tools available for monitoring Azure security and enforcing security and governance the right way. You'll also explore tools to detect threats before they can do any real damage and those that use machine learning and AI to analyze your security logs and detect anomalies. By the end of this cloud security book, you'll have understood cybersecurity in the cloud and be able to design secure solutions in Microsoft Azure.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Identity and Governance
5
Section 2: Cloud Infrastructure Security
9
Section 3: Security Management

Understanding MFA

There are few technical features that protect your accounts more than using MFA. With MFA, it is not enough to know a username and a password; you are also challenged to prove who you are using another authentication factor. With MFA, you generally need to be able to log in with the following:

  • Something you are, such as your user account name or a biometric attribute
  • Something you know, such as a password
  • Something you have, such as an additional authentication factor (smartcard, smartphone app, or security key)

Given the fact that an MFA challenge is only triggered following a successful login attempt, it is still reliant on passphrases that are not easy to guess. In other words, if an MFA challenge is triggered, the respective username/password combination has already been successfully validated (refer to the following screenshot for reference):

Figure 3.2 – An MFA challenge is triggered after the user's credentials...