Cloud & Containerization

AWS allows tags, arbitrary key-value pairs, to be assigned to many resources. Tags can be used to categorize resources however you like. Some examples: In an account holding multiple applications, a tag called “application” might be used to denote which application is associated with each resource. A tag called “stage”…

To ensure security of new 5G telecom networks, NCC Group has been providing guidance, conducting code reviews, red team engagements and pentesting 5G standalone and non-standalone networks since 2019. As with any network various attackers are motivated by different reasons. An attacker could be motivated to either gain information about…

Introduction The consumption of cloud services has grown rapidly over the last few years and one of the major providers to benefit from this growth is Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The security challenges faced by small/medium companies and enterprises when deploying new services into the cloud can often be daunting,…

tl;dr You can now have Scout Suite scan not only your cloud environments, but your Kubernetes clusters. Just have your kubeconfig ready and run the following commands: $ pip3 install ScoutSuite $ scout kubernetes Background NCC Group’s Container Orchestration Security Service (COSS) practice regularly conducts Kubernetes cluster configuration reviews spanning…

We are excited to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on Github)! This version includes multiple bug fixes, dependency updates and feature enhancements for AWS, Azure and GCP. It also adds and updates several rules for these three cloud providers, alongside improved…

Robust exception handling is one of the tenets of best practice for development, no matter what the coding language. This blog post explores the curious circumstances in which a developer trying to do the right thing – but without appreciating the full effects – could lead to data integrity issues…

As one of the proud contributors to the newest version of the CIS Google Cloud Platform Foundation Benchmark, I wanted to raise awareness about the new version release of this benchmark [1] by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and how it can help a company to set a strong…

We’re proud to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on Github)! The most significant improvements and features added include: Core Improved CLI options, test coverage and some dependencies AWS Added new findings for multiple services Bug fixes Added ARNs for all resources…

As one of the proud contributors to the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Microsoft 365 Foundation Benchmark, I wanted to raise awareness about the new version release by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) released on February 17th, and how it can help a company to have a secure baseline…

by Aaron Haymore, Iain Smart, Viktor Gazdag, Divya Natesan, and Jennifer Fernick Mainstream appreciation for cyberattacks targeting continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines has been gaining momentum. Attackers and defenders increasingly understand that build pipelines are highly-privileged targets with a substantial attack surface. But what are the potential…

Written by Ben Lister and Kane Ryans This blog post details the collaboration between NCC Group’s Detection Engineering team and our Containerisation team in tackling detection engineering for Kubernetes. Additionally, it describes the Detection Engineering team’s more generic methodology around detection engineering for new/emerging technologies and how it was used…

Last month, the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a Cybersecurity Technical Report (CTR) detailing the security hardening they recommend be applied to Kubernetes clusters, which is available here. The guidance the document contains is generally reasonable, but there are several points…

Unauthorised access to data is a primary concern of clients who commission a Salesforce assessment. The Salesforce documentation acknowledges that the sharing model is a “complex relationship between role hierarchies, user permissions, sharing rules, and exceptions for certain situations”[1]. It is often said that complexity and security are natural enemies.…

NCC Group will be presenting 4 different training courses at Black Hat USA 2021. Below you will find high level details about each course, as well as a link to a detailed course description and course registration details on the Black Hat website. Join us! Mastering Container Security V5 –…

Principal Mapper, or PMapper, is a tool and library for in-depth analysis with AWS Identity and Access Management, as well as AWS Organizations. PMapper stores data about AWS accounts and organizations, then provides options to query, visualize, and analyze that data. The library, written in Python, enables users to extend…

This post is a technical discussion of the underlying vulnerability of CVE-2020-15257, and how it can be exploited. Our technical advisory on this issue is available here, but this post goes much further into the process that led to finding the issue, the practicalities of exploiting the vulnerability itself, various…

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Sourya Biswas, “Cybersecurity is War: Lessons from Historical Conflicts,” to be presented at BSidesCT (Virtual – November 14 2020) Ian Coldwater (Independent), Duffie Cooley, Brad Geesaman (Darkbit), and Rory McCune (NCC Group), “Keynote: SIG-Honk AMA…

We’re proud to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on Github)! Notable improvements and features include: Core Breaking change: support for Python 3.5 has been deprecated Moved unit tests from nose to pytest improved coverage Bug fixes and improved error handling AWS Created…

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Dirk-Jan Mollema, “Walking Your Dog in Multiple Forests: Breaking AD Trust Boundaries through Kerberos Vulnerabilities,” to be presented at Black Hat Asia 2020 (Virtual – October 1 2020) Sanne Maasakkers, “Improve Security Awareness Campaigns by…

This month, NCC Group researchers will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Rami McCarthy, “AWS Security: Easy Wins and Enterprise Scale,” to be presented at BSides Boston (Virtual – September 26 2020) Dirk-Jan Mollema, “Walking Your Dog in Multiple Forests: Breaking AD Trust Boundaries through Kerberos Vulnerabilities,” to…

On a recent Kubernetes security assessment, Josh Makinen and I were provided restricted access to a GKE cluster and we noticed some disparity between our accounts’ access even though we were given the same permissions. This lead us into diving a bit deeper into how Kubernetes handles permission controls when…

On November 25th, AWS released the Ramp-Up Learning Guide for AWS Cloud Security, Governance, and Compliance. The Security Ramp-Up is a curated list of educational AWS resources. The goal is “to teach in-demand cloud skills and real-world knowledge that you can rely on to keep up with cloud security, governance,…

Istio is a service mesh, which, in general, exist as a compliment to container orchestrators (e.g. Kubernetes) in order to provide additional, service-centric features surrounding traffic management, security, and observability. Istio is arguably the most popular service mesh (using GitHub stars as a metric). This blog post assumes working familiarity…

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Adam Rudderman, “Bug Bounty: Why is this happening?” presented at Nullcon Goa (Goa, India – March 3-7 2020) Rob Wood, “[Panel]: CSIS Security Panel Discussion,” presented at OCP Global Summit (San Jose, CA – March…

On Saturday, February 1st, I gave my talk titled “Command and KubeCTL: Real-World Kubernetes Security for Pentesters” at Shmoocon 2020. I’m following up with this post that goes into more details than I could cover in 50 minutes. This will re-iterate the points I attempted to make, walk through the…

This month, members of NCC Group will be giving the following 6 conference presentations: Mark Manning, “Command and KubeCTL: Real-World Kubernetes Security for Pentesters” presented at Shmoocon (Washington, DC – January 31-February 2 2020) Clint Gibler, “How to 10X Your Company’s Security (Without a Series D),” presented at BSidesSF (San Francisco, CA…

Containerization solutions are becoming increasingly common throughout the industry due to their vast applications in logically separating and packaging processes to run consistently across environments. Docker represents these processes as images by packaging a base filesystem and initialization instructions for the runtime environment. Developers can use common base images and…

This month, in addition to the several dozen technical talks and trainings our researchers will offer at our internal conferences, NCC CON US and NCC CON Europe, two NCC Group researchers will also be presenting work publicly: Clint Gibler, “DevSecOps State of the Union v2.0,” presented at AppSec Cali (Santa…

Introduction At NCC Group, we routinely assess the configuration of our clients’ cloud environments. These reviews aim to ensure that the environments are in line with security best practice and provide appropriate protection for sensitive information and resources. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has grown steadily since 2011 – both in…

One of the questions that I’ve been asked on multiple occasions when presenting on Kubernetes security [1] is: “Which distribution should I install?” There are a bewildering number of options for deploying Kubernetes, with over 60 commercial products or open source projects providing methods of deploying it. Making an informed…

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) has recently released a new benchmark standard for Kubernetes deployments, providing a vendor-neutral benchmark to help companies assess against good security practices. Kubernetes is a key player in the containerisation technology market, seeking to help developers and IT staff effectively manage large fleets of…

This is just a short blog post to announce the availability of the new CIS Security Standard for Docker 1.12 which NCC Group was involved in co-authoring and contributing to. The Docker project (and containerisation as a concept in general) has become a hot topic in various aspects of IT…

Introduction As more of our services move to rented virtual servers, applying centralised protective monitoring becomes more of a challenge. Offerings such as Assuria’s Cloud Security Suite and Splunk’s Storm show the demand for elastic and easily configurable monitoring that can be deployed on cloud provisioned infrastructure. Amazon has responded…