A recent article in the Wall Street Journal ominously titled Capital One Breach Casts Shadow Over Cloud Security, veers dangerously close to blaming an internal company error at Capital One on one of the most secure companies in the world. The article might be better headlined as "dirty bath water casts shadow over baby".
The article stated that the Capital One data breach exposed the records of 106 million customers, which is a tragic security lapse regardless of where the fault might lie. But importantly, the Journal noted that according to court documents, a Capital One error – a misconfigured firewall – led to the breach. A Capital One spokesperson was also quoted as saying that "This type of vulnerability is not specific to the cloud." All of this would leave one to wonder why this incident "casts a shadow" over cloud security.
While it is true that no security is absolute, chances are that AWS is significantly safer that the large majority of IT fabric globally. At a majority of enterprises, a significant portion of IT's time goes into meetings that support the core business offering and internal politics. At AWS not only do they have their security products, services and contractors, but they even run their own security conference. By comparison infoSec teams at even the largest enterprises have sweeping oversight requirements that make it almost impossible to patrol effectively.
Enterprises looking to improve their security should evaluate the security protocols looking at:
- Infrastructure Security (Physical and Virtual)
- DDoS Mitigation
- Data Encryption
- Device Inventory and Configuration Management
- Monitoring and Logging
- Identity and Access Control
- Penetration Testing
Security is a constant game of cat and mouse, but moving away from AWS managed services (or other cloud providers) is just plain misinformed.