Chris Farris

In order to profit effectively from a ransomware attack, a threat actor needs to have something to offer in return for payment. This blog post outlines a process to encrypt AWS resources and then revoke access to the secret material until the ransom is paid. Apparently, this post caused some consternation at AWS, and perhaps I should have given them a heads up. So I’m unpublishing it for the time being and giving AWS some time to digest and see if they want to add any mitigations.

Cloud Hygiene is a Cloud Security problem, and we need to cleanup the pollution in our cloud environments

In September 2024, I returned to Stockholm to give a talk at Sec-T. The Slides are here, and the YouTube Video is here.

In the last year or so talking to organizations of all sizes, shapes, and security budgets, it’s become clear there is a deeper problem than just “developers don’t know how to not make a bucket public”. How we as an industry use the public cloud is fundamentally unsafe. We wouldn’t give any random 16-year-old kid with a driver’s license a 787 to fly. Yet, with the public cloud, anyone with a credit card can sign up for one of the most technically complex creations the IT Industry has ever created. Engineers fresh out of school are given access to enterprise cloud tenants and told to deploy their applications. At no point do the cloud providers take reasonable measures to ensure you are qualified to operate the cloud safely, nor are their default auto-pilot settings all that safe.

Sir Winston Churchill, introducing the Universal Cloud Threat Model to the House of Commons, June 1940.

The fine folks at HackCon invited me to Oslo to speak at their security conference. You can find the cloud security ramblings elsewhere on this site; this post is another in my series of practical advice for traveling outside the US.

HackCon was held in Oslo, Norway (cool) in February (wait, what?), and I’m happy to report I made it back home with all my fingers and toes and didn’t freeze to death.

Multicloud is Madness!!!!

Your organization is doing a poor job protecting the one cloud you have. Why in heaven’s name would you want to deploy into another cloud? In this two-part blog post, we’ll cover details from my HackCon 2024 talk “Chris Farris in the MultiCloud of Madness” (slides). Part one is here, and it covers all the weirdness between the three major hyperscalers - AWS, Azure, and GCP. The second part will provide checklists to help you establish Minimally Viable Cloud Governance in each cloud.

So earlier this year, I wrote (and then much later published) a blog post ripping AWS Security Hub. That led to conversations with folks on that team, and I got a chance to look at Security Hub’s new Central Configuration capabilities.

In short - this is an improvement for folks who use Security Hub and the built-in Security Standards. Sadly, it doesn’t solve many of the presentation issues that conflate “Compliance” and “Security”.

I’m back from re:Invent and still trying to adjust my sleep schedule (I’m on the East Coast and go to bed early; 6 pm Las Vegas time is my biological clock’s bedtime).

This year was one of my favorite re:Invents. I got to meet old and new co-workers and hang out with a lot of Community Builders and AWS Heroes, talk to service teams about what they should do to make their products work more for the security 99%. I got to a couple of good chalk talks on GenAI and GenAI security, which will help inform my poking at that over the holidays.

As for announcements, in the last seven days, there were 195 things posted to AWS What’s New. These are the ones I care to follow up on.

For simplicity, we’ll break them down into:

• Security Features
• Cloud Governance & Costs
• Serverless Stuff
• GenAI & Bedrock
• Other nifty stuff that may only matter to me
• I just wanna Snark

As has been my tradition the last few years, I prep for re:Invent by reviewing all the interesting announcements that happen in the weeks leading up to the event. This gives me a chance to keep an eye out for sessions and chalktalks related to things I care about, and a chance to corner an SA or product manager at the AWS Booth and go like this:

This year I’ll be attending AWS as a Security Hero. The good news for all 845,000 attendees is that I don’t have to wear tights. Instead I’ll be hanging out in the Heroes lounge with the other Heroes and Community Builders (hopefully sipping mimosas during the keynotes).

So I did it again. Proving I’m the most incompetent Security Hero EVER, I committed eight different access keys to a public GitHub repository for eight different AWS Accounts.

What is fascinating is the consistently inconsistent response of AWS support. Behold a tale of seven cities and a professor.