Security Archives - Easy Cloud Solutions

November 8, 2019 By ray

You need a password manager — right now

Who loves dealing with passwords? No one, that’s who. Making them, remembering them, having to create a new one when they expire and all you want to do is log in. Then there’s the dreaded breach-of-the-week, whern we find out about the latest major hack attack or big-data snafu, meaning we have to reset our passwords again. On top of all this, there are the accounts we need to just to keep the lights on, so remembering every single password is impossible. It’s enough to make anyone want to table-flip the internet.… Read more

October 8, 2019 By ray

ITAR: AWS IAM Best Practices

Lock Away Your AWS Account Root User Access Keys You use an access key (an access key ID and secret access key) to make programmatic requests to AWS. However, do not use your AWS account root user access key. The access key for your AWS account root user gives full access to all your resources for all AWS services, including your billing information.… Read more

October 8, 2019 By ray

Will Capital One’s 106M Name Data Breach Cut Into AWS’s Growth?

Should you own Amazon stock? It would certainly be a better investment if its most profitable business, AWS, was growing faster. And the odds of that happening would be better if the industry in which it competes — cloud services — was accelerating. But news that Capital One — a proud AWS customer whose stock plunged over 5% in premarket trade on July 30 — suffered a 106 million customer data breach makes me think it’s possible that AWS’s growth might slow down even more (AWS grew over 40% in previous quarters and slowed to 37% in the latest quarter) and give pause to companies in the middle of moving their IT operations to the cloud. Amazon stock — which trades 7% below its all-time high — is down nearly 1% in pre-market trading on July 30. (I am a Capital One customer and have no financial interest in the securities mentioned in this post).Today… Read more

October 2, 2019 By ray

Amazon’s cloud was at the heart of the big Capital One hack, even though it doesn’t seem to be at fault

On Monday evening, federal prosecutors said a tech worker named Paige A. Thompson had been charged with computer fraud and abuse on allegations that she stole data from millions of Capital One customers. In the complaint, we get some technical details about how investigators say it went down: A “firewall misconfiguration” left one of Capital One’s cloud servers vulnerable, allowing Thompson to send commands that let her access the sensitive data in question. The complaint doesn’t name the cloud provider used by Capital One in this instance, referring to it only as “Cloud Computing Company.”… Read more