Self preservation is AWS security's biggest worry, says gros fromage State-sponsored cyber armies, lone-wolf attackers, denial-of-service attacks ... which keep Amazon’s Web Services security boffins awake at night? None of the above. It’s customers – those who don’t protect themselves adequately against hackers and malware. That’s according AWS head of global security programs Bill Murray, …
There is no point staying up at night worrying about a problem you didn't cause and you can't do anything about
Make sure your platform is secured in a way that accepts that these vulnerabilities happen and protects the wider infrastructure and your other customers.
If customer A does something dumb and causes a problem to customer A then it's not your problem; if customer A does something dumb and that can impact customer B then I don't want to do business with you because your platform is full of holes
To an extent you're right, but also wrong.
They need to insulate customer B from nefarious customer A as far as possible, that's true.
But if customer A gets pwnd and the attacker ultimately manages to get a block of IPs added to a RBL then, even if customer A leaves, that may effect customer C (who's been unlucky enough to be allocated one of those IPs).
Would I lose sleep? No. But there is definitely some worth in trying to educate customers not to be complete tools when it comes to security.
Now that we're out of virgin IPv4 space, anyone running a mail server should check to ensure that those IPs aren't on any of the major RBLs.
I had the same issue a few months back where my ISP allocated us a new /24 but it was black-listed, took a few emails to Spamhaus and a few others, but got everything cleared up. Doing this has more or less become a necessity in this day and age. Hell, you should be doing this periodically on blocks you already own.
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Missed a big opportunity for your article picture, I think this poor guy's life must be much like in the movie, every day he wakes up to to the same nightmare of having to deal with legal and illegal attempts to get at his customer's data, and he'll be the first one they blame when a mega-hack occurs for an AWS client.
Like Gemalto found out, you can be plugging along hunky-dory until your company name is splashed all over the headlines because a few years back one of your engineers used Facebook from within the company network and ever since then your companies' data has been owned.
Hat's off to Mr. Murray, I wouldn't want his job..
Tallahassee: You think you might pull through?
Bill Murray: No.
Columbus: If it means anything now, I am so sorry. It was just instinctive.
Bill Murray: It was my bad. I was never a very good practical joker.
Little Rock: So do you have any regrets?
Bill Murray: "Garfield," maybe.
"According to him, securing an application or service online in AWS is little or no different to if you were running the software on your own servers."
So if you have to do your own security and you want guaranteed availability and capacity at a reasonable price, you're better off keeping it in house?
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