Why File Integrity Monitoring and Shift-Left Security Are Crucial for Container Environments
Since ancient times, attacks have come under the guise of gifts and other wrapped packages. In today’s digital landscape, Trojan horses, malware and social engineering attacks fool human employees and machines, in order to spy, spread malice, or siphon financial data and money.
Files can also get corrupted and then penetrate your digital inventory and workflows as bad copies proliferate in the server environment. Security patching doesn’t keep up and this leaves you even more vulnerable to a deep data attack.
Organizations must have additional checkpoints for file and traffic inspection. This calls for a shift to more proactive security and security-infused development, a practice known as DevSecOps. File integrity monitoring can be one such achievable outward security checkpoint mechanism when performed from the cloud.
Yet, according to Gartner, “Existing operational and security processes, along with the associated tools, either fail to keep up with the pace of the cloud or are totally unsuited for it.”
One big catch is file inspection and other security enforcements too often require backhauling traffic to a data center. The cloud may actually be complicating this. For your internally operated virtual machine environment or containers, the ubiquitous cloud allows you to process data and files near or at the transaction and stay compliant with regional privacy laws. But is the data secure, and are your files vulnerable to contamination? Do you have to backhaul all this traffic and these files in order to secure them?… or worse, do you forgo advanced security measures in your edge container environments?
File Integrity Monitoring
What can go wrong?
Well, for one, the cost of accessing and ensuring security on the data and files coming from the cloud can accumulate through secure cloud APIs and cloud egress fees, the latter which data-intensive NASA learned would cost it an estimated tens of millions of dollars to retrieve its own stored data.
And then there’s the matter of security on that storage and access.
Application and data containers themselves are not advanced security mechanisms. Containers don’t systematically disallow discrepancies but rather target known threats. Best practice is to not only inspect files but keep the environment clean, whether it’s a web server or database, whether cloud-based or internally operated.
In June 2020, a hacker obtained 270GB of data from 251 law enforcement sites by exploiting decades-old software. A few years earlier, a hacker stole the data of hundreds of millions of Equifax customers by breaking into a consumer complaint portal that hadn’t yet been patched against the evolving landscape of vulnerabilities and attack mechanisms. Infection detection delays will exacerbate an attack. According to Statista, 1,506 U.S. organizations experienced a breach in 2019, costing them 164 million exposed records.
But don’t despair. The cloud as-a-service-model can bring the same level of distributed and far-reaching capabilities to security as it does to computing, data storage, and analysis. Zeitgeist approaches such as shift-left security and SASE are taking security out to the edge, and, yes, the cloud can help to make this proactive distributed security possible.
The Bigger OSSEC Picture
Atomic Enterprise OSSEC bundles and integrates key security capabilities to equip organizations and their application containers with:
Intrusion Protection—Detect and stop anomalous behaviors in containers and cloud workloads.
File Integrity Monitoring—Validate the integrity of containers, operating systems and application files.
Log Management & Routing—Monitor your containers in real time, collect and manage log events, and route to SIEMs or other monitoring systems.
Security Orchestration, Automation and Response—Integrate and automate your security workflows and response.
Active Response—Automate response and other actions based on IOCS, events, alerts, and changes to your containers, systems or files, all while reducing noise and false alarms.
Command Line Interface—Integrate easily with your existing DevOps toolchains, and gain enhanced visibility and control over your containers and computing environments.
Workload Traffic Management & Protection—Secure workloads throughout, regardless of where they are running: public cloud, private cloud or hybrid infrastructures, including legacy systems.
Join us at OSSEC Holiday Con 2020 to find out more.
