Part 2 – Your Beleaguered Security Analyst...A Story of Heat
Now that you’ve heard my counterpart’s side of the
story I want to welcome you to my world, where cloud-native chaos meets organized, controlled, logical security policy.
It’s Monday morning, and I’m cautiously sipping my coffee, waiting for the barrage of scanner findings and subsequent alerts to drop. It’s not
if they’ll come; it’s
when. I, carefully, log in to my dashboard and there they are….”my precious”. It is the end of times; it is the
iCloud of Sauron (see what I did there?!?).
There’s the classic “S3 bucket exposed to the internet” alert. Great. Somewhere out there, a bucket (folder) is hanging out in cyberspace with its trench coat wide open, inviting anyone and everyone to browse through our sensitive data. Lovely. Next, a notification about an API Gateway that’s unsecure. Fantastic. And then there’s a misconfigured IAM role or one that has benefited from multiple roles scope creep, giving read/write access to an entire database—because who doesn’t want the keys to the kingdom?
I started triaging like a doctor in an emergency room, but this ER is filled with a high number of hypochondriacs. I’m sifting through log data, deciding which fire to put out first. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, except the moles are on fire, and every time I hit one, three more pop up, screaming, “FIX ME!”
A breach report hits the news. Some well-known company just got compromised because of a misconfigured cloud service, and my boss wants me to present later today to the C-Suite and assure them we don’t have the same issues (uh..ok..sure). The execs, not unexpectedly, ask, “Are we vulnerable to this?”
I want to tell them, “Of course not!” But instead, I dig through our cloud configurations, frantically searching for signs of similar weaknesses. I’m scrolling through IAM roles, S3 bucket policies, ACLs, DACLs, SACLs (you get the point) and security group rules, the latest scan findings (SAST, DAST, SCA, again, you get the point), etc. By the time I’ve assured them we’re not the next headline, for the moment, I’m a sweaty mess.
Now, let’s talk about my real nightmare fuel: a vulnerability in our cloud-native application caused by an open-source logging library. Picture this: I’m going through the alerts when I spot one that sends a chill down my spine. It’s about a popular open-source logging package we integrated months ago to capture and manage all our application logs. Logging!! (Readers, if this sounds familiar, that’s because think how much worse this is for me than my colleague). There’s a flaw in how it handles log entries containing certain special characters. An attacker could inject malicious commands into our logs, which could then be executed on our servers when those logs are processed. In other words, someone could turn a seemingly innocent log entry into a ticking time bomb. I am glad I hadn’t seen this Application Security issue prior to my C-Suite briefing…so technically I wasn’t lying.
I immediately send a warning to the dev team. “Hey, we need to update the logging library. This vulnerability could lead to remote code execution if someone injects a crafted payload into our logs.” The response? “We’re only logging internal events. No user input goes into the logs, so we should be safe.” Famous last words.
I try to explain that while we don’t
intend to log user input, logs are messy, unpredictable beasts. All it takes is one overlooked entry point—maybe a debug statement left in during testing or an error message that includes user data—and boom, we could be in trouble. They agree to update the library “when they get a chance,” which in developer-speak means it’s going to the bottom of the to-do list, right next to “refactor that ancient authentication module” and “clean up the code comments from 2015.” Meanwhile, I’m left imagining our logs coming to life to wreak havoc. This old logging library, meant to keep us safe and informed, could end up being the very thing that takes us down if we’re not careful. And so, I add it to my growing list of things to worry about, which, if you are wondering, is not a short list.
It’s a classic standoff: the developers think I’m overreacting while I’m desperately trying to prevent our application from becoming a hacker’s playground. I’m stuck in the middle, waving my security alerts like an
airport marshaller. The developers start complaining that I’m sending too many false positives, which is not an unfair statement in practice, but this is an art, not a science. I explain, once again, that just because the vulnerability isn’t exploitable right now doesn’t mean we should ignore it.
This is the life I’ve chosen—or maybe the life that chose me. I’m a humble security analyst trying to hold the orcs at bay, putting my fingers in the dike of cybersecurity, trying to make a radio edit of any Nicki Minaj song, again, you get the idea. And if I must be the bad guy in the eyes of the developers, so be it. At least I know I’m doing my part to keep “The Shire” safe.
