Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Monitoring requires a multi-faceted approach if DevOps teams want end-to-end visibility and deep insight into issues. This is especially true in the case of modern microservices applications, which are essentially collections of distributed services that talk to each other over a service mesh. With monolithic applications, requests can be tracked easily from the client to the server and back, but with modern applications, every request passes through numerous services before completion.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you are probably familiar with the recent Shadow Brokers data dump of the Equation Group tools. In that release a precision SMB backdoor was included called Double Pulsar. This backdoor is implemented by exploiting the recently patched Windows vulnerability: CVE-2017-0143. For detection, we are going to first focus on the backdoor portion of the implant, hunting for traces left behind on the network.

Throughout the history of software development, one statement has remained true: no application is perfect. Due to that fact, development organizations must work with all resources at their disposal to limit the impact that application problems have on the end-user. Server log files represent an important resource that should be referred to during the process for troubleshooting any application issue.

A number of domain “forgeries” or tricky, translated look-alikes have been observed recently. These attack campaigns cleverly abuse International Domain Names (IDN) which, once translated into ASCII in a standard browser, result in the appearance of a corporate or organization name that allows the targeting of such organization’s domains for impersonation or hijacking. This attack has been researched and defined in past campaigns as an IDN homograph attack.

Today’s modern deployment pipeline is arguably one of the most important aspects of an organization’s infrastructure. The ability to take source code and turn it into a production application that’s scalable, reliable and highly available has become an enormous undertaking due to the pervasiveness of modern application architectures, multi- or hybrid-cloud deployment strategies, container orchestration and the leftward movement of security into the pipeline.

The ability of an actor to remain undiscovered or obfuscating its doings when driving a malicious campaign usually affects the gains of such campaigns. These gains can be measured in different items such as time to allow completion of operations (exfiltration, movement of compromised data), ability to remain operative before take down notices are issued, or ability to obtain gains based on for-profit driven crimeware (DDoS for hire, Crypto mining).

Edge computing is likely the most interesting section of the broader world of IoT. If IoT is about connecting all the devices to the Internet, edge computing is about giving more processing power to devices at the edge. Edge computing views these edge devices as mini clouds or mini data centers. They each have their own mini servers, mini networking, mini storage, apps running on top of this infrastructure, and endpoint devices.

Our digital surface is expanding rapidly and threats are becoming more sophisticated day by day. This is putting enormous strain on security teams, which have already been stretched to the limits. Nonetheless, organizations are skeptical of relieving this cybersecurity strain with AI and automation. Why does this situation persist when it’s simply against the logic?

A type of credential reuse attack known as credential stuffing has been recently observed in higher numbers towards industry verticals. Credential stuffing is the process of automated probing of and access to online services using credentials usually coming from data breaches, or bought in the criminal underground.