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Solving The Cloud Security Puzzle

By Anthony Scotney, founder & CEO, StratoKey

Protecting cloud applications is a puzzle. The puzzle is complicated by all the moving pieces that
expose yet another point of exploitation. But it is not unsolvable.

The secret to solving the cloud security puzzle comes down to a detail-oriented approach that
focuses on visibility, user access interrogation, securing data before it reaches the cloud, and
automated threat response.

Visibility

One of the great challenges with cloud and indeed web/SaaS deployed applications is the lack of
visibility. Often Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) infrastructure has no access to
logs of software provided as a service. This creates what is known as the SIEM blind spot.

Without visibility of how users are accessing end systems, organizations are at the mercy of third
parties to determine their security outcomes, which is an unacceptable risk. Fortunately, there
are solutions for uncloaking these SIEM blind spots.

Generally, the most effective way to gain insight and complete visibility is to lock cloud deployed
applications to a security gateway. Users then transit through the gateway on their way to the cloud
application.

This can take the form of a proxy server. As users transit through the gateway, significant security
insight can be gained which can be added to the overall security picture for your applications.

User Access Interrogation

Often overlooked, User Access Interrogation is critically important for securing access to
information. This is the leading reason why spear phishing and user credential theft is such an
effective attack vector. Organizations are simply not doing enough to adequately interrogate users
logging into their systems.

Non-hostile user interrogation (performed by technical analysis on the back-end) is key to securing
access to confidential information. Currently, applications ask for a user's credentials (think drivers
license) without ever looking at their face to confirm the identity. In many ways this is a result of the
maturity cycle of the web.

Threat actors have caught onto this lack of identity verification but unfortunately the vast majority of
infrastructure is still lagging behind.

It is possible to defeat user credential theft based attacks with appropriate technology, yet they
remain a major cause of data breaches. Solutions to this security vulnerability can range from taking

37 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – September 2015 Edition
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