One thing to keep in mind when putting your company’s applications in the cloud, specifically on Amazon AWS, is that you are still largely responsible for securing them. Amazon AWS has solid security in place, but you do not entrust the security aspect to Amazon thinking that your applications are totally secure because they are hosted there. In fact, Amazon AWS has a shared security responsibility model depicted by this diagram:

Source:  Amazon AWS

Amazon AWS is responsible for the physical and infrastructure security, including hypervisor, compute, storage, and network security; and the customer is responsible for application security, data security, Operating System (OS) patching and hardening, network and firewall configuration, identity and access management, and client and server-side data encryption.

However, Amazon AWS provides a slew of security services to make your applications more secure. They provide the AWS IAM for identity and access management, Security Groups to shield EC2 instances (or servers), Network ACLs that act as firewall for your subnets, SSL encryption for data transmission, and user activity logging for auditing. As a customer, you need to understand, design, and configure these security settings to make your applications secure.

In addition, there are advance security services that Amazon AWS provides, so that you don’t have to build them, including the AWS Directory Service for authentication, AWS KMS for Security Key Management, AWS WAF Web Application Firewall for deep packet inspection, and DDOS mitigation.

There is really no perfect security, but securing your infrastructure at every layer tremendously improves the security of your data and applications in the cloud.

With all the news about security breaches, we often hear about external cyber attacks, but internal attacks are widely unreported. Studies show that between 45% to 60% of all attacks were carried out by insiders. In addition, it is harder to detect and prevent insider attacks because access and activities are coming from trusted systems.

Why is this so common and why is this so hard to mitigate? The following reasons have been cited to explain why there are more incidents of internal security breaches:

1. Companies don’t employ data protection, don’t apply patches on time, or don’t enforce any security policies/standards (such as using complex passwords). Some companies wrongly assume that installing a firewall can protect them from inside intruders.

2. Data is outside of the control of IT security such as when the data is in the cloud.

3. The greatest reason for security breach is also the weakest link in the security chain – the people. There are two types of people in this weak security chain:

a. People who are vulnerable such as careless users who use USB, send sensitive data using public email services, or sacrifice security in favor of convenience. Most of the time, users are not aware that their account has already been compromised via malware, phishing attacks, or stolen credentials gleaned from social networks.

b. People who have their own agenda or what we call malicious users. These individuals want to steal and sell competitive data or intellectual properties to gain money, or they probably have personal vendetta against the organization.

There are however proven measures to lessen the gravity of insider threats:

1. Monitor the users, especially those who hold the potential for greatest damage – top executives, contractors, vendors, at-risk employees, and IT administrators.

2. Learn the way they access the data, create a baseline and detect any anomalous behavior.

3. When a divergent behavior is detected such as unauthorized download or server log-ins, perform an action such as block or quarantine user.

It should be noted that when an individual is caught compromising security, more often than not, damage has already been done. The challenge is to be proactive in order for the breach to not happen in the first place.

An article in Harvard Business Review has argued that psychology is the key to detecting internal cyber threats.

In essence, companies should focus on understanding and anticipating human behavior such as analyzing employee language (in their email, chat, and text) continuously and in real time. The author contends that “certain negative emotions, stressors, and conflicts have long been associated with incidents of workplace aggression, employee turnover, absenteeism, accidents, fraud, sabotage, and espionage”

Applying big data analytics and artificial intelligence on employees language in email, chat, voice, text logs and other digital communication may uncover worrisome content, meaning, language pattern, and deviation in behavior, that may make it easier to spot indications that a user is a security risk or may perform malicious activity in the future.

Data is one of the most important assets of an organization; hence, it must be secured and protected. Data typically goes in and out of an organization’s internal network in order to conduct business and do valuable work. These days, data reside in the cloud, go to employees’ mobile devices or to business partners’ networks. Laptops and USB drives containing sensitive information sometimes get lost or stolen.

In order to protect the data, security must travel with the data. For a long time, the focus of security is on the network and on the devices where the data resides. Infrastructure security such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, etc. are not enough anymore. The focus should now shift to protecting the data itself.

Data-centric security is very useful in dealing with data breaches, especially with data containing sensitive information such as personally identifiable information, financial information and credit card numbers, health information and intellectual property data.

The key to data-centric security is strong encryption because if the public or hackers get ahold of sensitive data, it will show up as garbled information which is pretty much useless to them. To implement a robust data-centric security, the following should be considered:

1. Strong data at rest encryption on the server/storage side, applications and databases.
2. Strong in-transit encryption using public key infrastructure (PKI).
3. Effective management of encryption keys.
4. Centralized control of security policy which enforce standards and protection on data stored on the devices at the endpoints or on the central servers and storage.

During my job-related trip to Israel a couple of months ago, I was subjected to a thorough security check at the airport. I learned later on that everybody goes through the same process. It was a little inconvenient, but in the end, I felt safe.

With all the advance technologies in security, nothing beats the old way of conducting security – thorough checks on individuals. I also noticed the defense in depth strategy at the Israel airport – the several layers of security people have to pass to get to their destinations. No wonder some of the greatest IT security companies come from Israel (e.g. Checkpoint Firewall).

As an IT security professional (I’m a CISSP certified), I can totally relate to the security measures Israel has to implement. And companies need to learn from them. Not a day goes by that we learn companies being hacked, shamed, and extorted by hackers around the world.

Sadly, some companies only take security seriously when it’s too late – when their data has been stolen, their systems have been compromised, and their twitter account has been taken over. It will be a never ending battle with hackers, but it’s a great idea to start securing your systems now.